URLs du Jour

2018-10-31

Happy Halloween! (I guess. I hate Halloween.) But here's a
day-appropriate, perceptive article from Charles C. W. Cooke,
detailing a little-acknowledged truth about American politics:
Everyone Wants You to Be Scared.
It is
based off this tweet from a CNN Droid:

It is not, of course, untrue that President Trump wants Republican voters to be scared when voting. He does, and how. But — and this is the bit that Cillizza misses — so does every other politician in the United States. “Fear,” it seems, conjugates in much the same way as do “politics” and “divisiveness”: I run on hope, you run on fear; I do what’s right, you do what’s political; If we all agreed with my plan we’d be united; that you want us to agree with yours makes you divisive. And so on.

Examples abound, should one be clear-eyed enough to see them, and
Charles' eyes are clearer than most. Certainly a lot clearer than
Cillizza's.

Trump made a particularly dumb move when he threatened to curb
birthright citizenship via executive order. Eminently predictable
reaction: Fourteenth Amendment, Trump hates the Constitution, aieee,
what parts of the Constitution will he try to override next?

And just about every honest Republican (there are a few) who (correctly) derided Obama's
immigration EOs, made because Congress "failed to act", as a
travesty must realize that it's equally lousy for Trump to do the
same.

But lost in the shuffle is the actual argument about the
relevant language of the Fourteenth Amendment, especially to
us original public meaning fans. At the Volokh Conspiracy,
Ilya Somin does a fine job of laying out the issues of
Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution.

In a recent interview, President Donald Trump claimed that he can issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States. The proposed order might also prevent US-born children of foreigners here on temporary visas from getting citizenship. Can Trump legally do that? The short answer is no. The Fourteenth Amendment gives birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, if they are born on US soil. Even if that were not the case, the power to grant citizenship is a congressional power, not an executive one. I have some reservations about the morality and policy of birthright citizenship. But the constitutional issue is clear: Trump does not have the power to end birthright citizenship at all, and certainly not by an executive order issued without congressional authorization.

Although Ilya makes his position clear, he also provides (and
rebuts) arguments for the other side.

The details of the deal were famously written on the back of a napkin when [Foxconn chairman Terry Gou] and the Republican governor first met: a $3 billion state subsidy in return for Foxconn's $10 billion investment in a Generation 10.5 LCD manufacturing plant that would create 13,000 jobs. [...] But what seemed so simple on a napkin has turned out to be far more complicated and messy in real life. As the size of the subsidy has steadily increased to a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion, Foxconn has repeatedly changed what it plans to do, raising doubts about the number of jobs it will create. Instead of the promised Generation 10.5 plant, Foxconn now says it will build a much smaller Gen 6 plant, which would require one-third of the promised investment, although the company insists it will eventually hit the $10 billion investment target. And instead of a factory of workers building panels for 75-inch TVs, Foxconn executives now say the goal is to build "ecosystem" of buzzwords called "AI 8K+5G" with most of the manufacturing done by robots.

As Reason noted
back
in June,
another "feature" of crony
capitalism was heavily involved: the abuse of eminent domain to
transfer residents' property to a private company. We knew that
President Trump was a fan, but it's sad to see Republicans like
Walker (and also Paul Ryan) as cheerleaders for it as well.

When medical researchers commit academic fraud, patients pay the price. A “star surgeon” at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden performed experimental implantations of synthetic tracheas (windpipes) on sick patients, based on his fraudulent research. Three patients died. Harvard Medical School recently called for the retraction of 31 papers by a former faculty member working with cardiac stem cells, because those papers “included falsified and/or fabricated data.” At least one patient died due to an invasive heart biopsy during a clinical trial based in part on that fraudulent work.

The latest fraudster is Dr. Brian Wansink, famous ex-Cornell nutrition
professor, whose heavily-publicized and self-promoted "research" led
to numerous regulatory changes at the Federal level. And now much of
that research has been—"never mind"—retracted.

Peter Earle eloquently exploded the notion that voting in political elections is an exalted means of self-expression. Few myths are more lethal to liberty than that which equates freedom with majoritarian democracy - and no fallacy does more to fuel this myth than that which declares the essence of freedom to be the right to vote.

In reality, voting is an extraordinarily skimpy and muted means of giving voice to your individual values, hopes, concerns, and preferences. And the right to vote is certainly no great bulwark to protect your liberty.

Don goes on to contrast voting with your simple, unglamorous,
revealed market preferences, which have a far greater impact than
what you'll be doing (or not) next Tuesday.

You won't find a more ardent anti-tax person than me. But I would
vastly
prefer that the great state of New Hampshire have the guts to get rid of its gambling
"games", and make up for it with an income or sales tax, if
necessary.

Do you remember those grade school exercises where you had to divide a bunch of statements into facts and opinions? The trick to getting an ‘A’ was easy: if a statement could be looked up in a reference book or checked by simple observation—e.g., “Topeka is in Kansas,” “An isosceles triangle has two sides of equal length,” “My sneakers are white,”—you labeled it a fact (even if it was false!); otherwise it was an opinion.

At the time, I gave the exercises little thought, but they should have bothered me. I certainly considered “Hitler was evil,” “Catherine Bach is beautiful,” “Johnny Carson is funny,” and “The food in the school cafeteria is lousy” to all be facts, though none of them could be checked in reference books. On the other hand, “Elvis is alive and working at a Denny’s in Tucson” could be checked, but that didn’t seem like a fact to me.

Those grade school exercises never made it to the midwest in the
late 50s/early 60s, I guess, or if they did, I don't remember them.
But Thomas argues, convincingly, that the fact/opinion dichotomy used back in the
day was garbage.

And (worse) the confusion continues in "research" performed by the
Pew (Pew! Pew!) Center, and reported in the Atlantic.

The PC attack on Apu, the most famous immigrant on The Simpsons, came to a conclusion this week as producers finally admitted that the character was being permanently shelved.

As I wrote earlier this year in pieces for both National Review and Ricochet, this conclusion was inevitable. We have seen time and again that once political correctness is injected into such an issue, the only solution is to ban the controversial item from the social consciousness altogether. When the Left attacked Brandon Eich, former CEO of tech company Mozilla, for his anti-gay-marriage stances, did they simply want him to tone his opinions down? Or did they want him fired? When a high-schooler last year wore a Chinese-themed dress to prom, did they want a thoughtful discussion about the cultural issues involved, or did they want to shame the girl into oblivion, and to prevent any other white teenage girls from following suit and wearing such ethnically inspired clothing?

Apu might have been one of the most admirable characters on The
Simpsons; his only crime being the nutritionally-dangerous stuff
he sold at the Kwikee Mart.

After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public
school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating
students and preparing them for the real world. To make matters
worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was
not just by accident, but by design.

Feeling the education system was beyond repair, Gatto could no longer in good conscience be an active participant. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of “I Quit, I Think” to the Wall Street Journal, where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991.

From the op-ed: "If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt
kids to make a living, let me know."

I have a couple of Gatto's books on my shelves. Maybe it's time to
throw them on the to-be-reread pile.

When people think about Halloween, they think about candy, children
in costumes, and scary decorations. I think about all these things
too, obviously, but I find myself thinking also about sugar
subsidies.

Halloween is one of the biggest holidays for buying and consuming candy. Americans will spend about $2.7 billion on 600 million pounds of candy for eager trick-or-treaters. That’s $76 annually per American. This sum is much more than we would pay if legislators didn’t give the sugar lobby what it wants the most: federal programs designed to artificially enrich U.S. sugar growers.

I should mention that my state's otherwise-dreadful Senator Jeanne
Shaheen is actually on the side of the good guys in the war against
sugar subsidies.

Minds Make Societies

Another book I can't quite recall why I put on the get-at-library list.
But I did (ILL from Boston College, thanks). And I regret to say, it
wasn't for me.

The author, Pascal Boyer, is an anthropologist and evolutionary
psychologist, now teaching at Washington U in St. Louis. His goal here
is to offer evolution-based explanations for the puzzling behavior of
human belings, around the globe and over history.

The main part of the book is organized around various questions. For
example:

Why are humans so good at cooperating in small groups, but fiercely
(and sometimes violently) competitive with humans outside their group?

We are pretty good at accumulating information quickly and using it
to make good decisions about our future. But also common are various
forms of group irrationality: moral panics, investment bubbles,
socialism. Why is that?

Why is modern religion such a recent development in human history?

We like to think that our current traditions and laws involving
family life are "natural", based on our human nature. But, given the
sweep of history, are they really?

We seem to have notions of "fairness" and "trade" built into our brains,
but just and prosperous societies have (again) only relatively recently
developed. Is that just a big hairy accident, likely doomed to
self-destruction?

With regard to the religion one, I found myself asking: if God called
Abraham only around 4,000 years ago, what was He up to for the
previous 200,000 years of mankind's history? Just not paying
attention? How does my local pastor explain that, anyway?

Anyway: These could be fascinating topics. Prof Boyer does his level best to
make them dull.

Well, that's unfair. Probably a more accurate way of putting it: he doesn't write down to my level.
Sample sentence, plucked at random (page 228):

So the force dynamics that come to mind when we think about power
relations, those notions of pushing and pulling, of force and
resistance, are only very awkward ways of representing large-scale
interactions that are vastly more complex, and indeed too complex for
our conscious representations.

Yeah, well, maybe. I got the (probably unfair) idea that Prof Boyer
wrote this in French, got someone else to translate it into English.

Anyway: it's one of those "I looked at every page" books. And I learned
stuff, but probably missed a lot too.

URLs du Jour

On paper, carbon capture is a simple proposition: Take carbon that we’ve pulled out of the Earth in the form of coal and oil and put into the atmosphere, and pull it out of the atmosphere and put it back in the Earth. It’s like hitting undo on the Industrial Revolution. And scientists can indeed yank CO2 out of thin air, except that the process is expensive, not very efficient, and morally complicated.

"Morally complicated", you say?

It's an odd way for the people who claim to "frickin' love science"
to put the issue, but they're no longer much pretending to disguise
the Bible-thumping damn-the-sinners nature of their secular
crusade. (I was going to say "holy crusade" -- but it's more like a
"holier-than-thou crusade.")

Simon's article is actually pretty good, though, if you strip out
the tedious moralizing. Unfortunately, he kind of glosses over what
I've long seen to be the real problem: if and (almost certainly) when
we get global climate engineering technology up to speed, who decides how
much and when to deploy it?

Put another way: if your family occasionally
bickers about where to set the thermostat in your house, multiply
that bickering by 10 billion or so, and give a lot of the
participants
dangerous weaponry.

"If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble," Bezos said at the Wired 25 conference. "I like this country … this country is a gem. And it's amazing. It's the best place in the world. It's the place where people want to come."

Now, look: I'd have loved Bezos even if he didn't donate millions to military charities and feel the need to stick up for our armed forces in the face of tech-bro aggression. Amazon has made my life as a consumer better in every conceivable way: anything I want, I can have, and in a minimum of time at a reasonable cost. Amazon delivers happiness one brown box at a time and anyone who denies this is a filthy communist. But Bezos stands out because he manages to improve the world without being forced to by do-gooder lawmakers.

When discussing transgenderism, moral and scientific certitude are too often conflated. This is presumably why activist agendas, strong on assertions and flimsy on evidence, are being promoted by people who really ought to know better. Yes, of course, the rights and feelings of those who experience gender dysphoria, and those who are transgender, should not be trampled on. Yes, obviously, compassion is key. But this includes the right to receive accurate medical information — the right to informed consent.

Take, for instance, the recent New York Times article by Perri Klass, M.D., in which she “misstated” that youth with gender dysphoria have “triple the rate of suicide.” The Times has since corrected that. And in journalism, which is Klass’s profession in addition to pediatrics, honest mistakes are sometimes made. Nevertheless, her article stands as a textbook example of the tendency in the mainstream media to report on gender dysphoria with pithy slogans, half-truths, and non sequiturs, all presumably justified by the broader cause of making life easier for trans people (and why would you oppose that?).

Ms. Kearns takes Dr. Klass to class for writing that "Gender
identity is a brain thing", and specifically, only a handful
of words later, that it's "independent of your body parts".

And … wait a minute … since when was the brain not a body
part? (And I didn't even come close to going to med school.)

After many decades in the close-but-not-quite World Series doghouse
for the Boston Red Sox, we've been (now) treated to four
championships over the past 15 seasons (2004, 2007, 2013, and—yay!—2018).

But it was arduous. And it's one thing to bail on a post-10pm
regular-season game
played in Seattle, but you can't really do that with the World
Series. At Reason, Steve Chapman claims:
World
Series Games Don't Have to Take So Long. He's especially down on
pitching changes:

Watching managers take the ball from one pitcher and hand it to another is about as exciting as watching someone buy snacks from a vending machine. Baseball has always been a game in which most of the actual playing time features a lot of people standing around waiting for something to happen. Now each game features a lot of people standing around waiting for the game to resume so they can stand around waiting for something to happen.

It's as though Major League Baseball, responding to the perception of many people that the game was slow and tedious, decided to address that complaint by making it even...slower...and...more...tedious.

I know it's heresy, but I've fantasized about a pitch clock: throw
the ball within 35 seconds of your previous pitch, or it's an
automatic ball.

And to even things up a bit: no batter-requested timeouts. If you're
not ready to swing the bat when the pitch comes, it's just too darn
bad. Plan your day better.

As America’s leading chronicler of our orphanhood stories, I’m
tempted to say, I told you so! Daredevil, too, has become a story
full of orphans, like “Deadpool” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.” I
assume this is because these stories, although written for
millennials, are written by Gen X-ers, so many of whom actually had
to deal with the crisis of divorce the baby boomers brought to
America.

So the story is written from the point of view of rejected or abandoned children, who lash out at themselves and the world, and end up thinking they’re all alone — orphans in a hostile universe. This is a bit melodramatic, but it seems true to what goes on in the heart of such a child.

If you run through the tangled family histories of your favorite
comic book heroes (and villains too)—it's hard to think of
any nuclear families in their backstories
(other than the actually radioactive kind).

URLs du Jour

Kevin D. Williamson, imitating Steven Pearce, hits one out of the
park at National Review:
Rage Makes You Stupid.
RTWT, of course, but here's a taste:

What are we supposed to think about political rage?

Before and after the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, the suspect in the recent string of bombs sent to prominent Democrats and media figures, we were treated to any number of homilies about “rage” and its origins in “toxic” political rhetoric. Many of these homilies were pointed directly or indirectly at President Donald Trump and his immoderate Twitter habits. That political rage is necessarily linked to political violence was assumed, and sometimes asserted, but rarely argued.

Five minutes before that, rage was all the rage. Rebecca Traister, an editor for New York magazine, has just published a book celebrating the “revolutionary power” of anger, which was celebrated at The Atlantic on 4 October under a headline noting the “seismic power” of “rage.” On 21 September, the Washington Post affirmed that “rage is healthy, rational, and necessary for America.” On Friday, NBC news praised a television show for depicting “anger as righteous and necessary.” Before that, it ran a segment encouraging certain political partisans to “embrace their rage.”

We looked at Rebecca Traister
a
couple weeks back and her efforts say that our state's motto,
"Live Free or Die" was based in rage. (Gee, rage really does
make you stupid.)

I’m grieving with you today. I know the neighborhood where Tree of Life synagogue sits – it’s a quiet, well-off, slightly Bohemian ‘burb with a lot of techies living in it.

I’m not Jewish myself, but I figured out a long time ago that any society which abuses its Jews – or tolerates abuse of them – is in the process of flushing itself down the crapper. The Jews are almost always the first targets of the enemies of civilization, but never the last.

He goes on to offer his Jewish readers instruction in firearms and defense against
shooters. If you're so inclined…

You might accuse the council of irrelevance in attacking a creed so antiquated as socialism. But a recent Gallup poll found that Democrats have greater faith in socialism than capitalism. You don’t have to think of those people as card-carrying Maoists to wish them some edification in both history and economics, if only to prevent the opposition to President Donald Trump from falling into its own excesses.

Nor is an endorsement of actual socialism so far removed from the history of the economics profession. Paul Samuelson, recent Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus and John Kenneth Galbraith, among others, expressed their admiration for the economic growth performance of the Soviet economic system. (The report notes this detail on Page 20.)

More to the point, by far the longest section in the report covers a specific health-care bill, introduced in both the Senate and House and supported by 141 members of Congress, that has become a centerpiece of debate in the Democratic Party. It is hardly irrelevant.

Tyler's praise is not unmixed, but, gee, it's kind of a relief to
see something out of the White House besides random semi-hinged tweets from
President Trump.

I can't resist echoing Tyler's closing paragraph:

The truly sad feature of the report is that it is not intended for the president, who probably couldn’t care less about the recommendations of professional economists. That, too, is a dangerous path to socialism.

Zing!

I've never linked to New Left Review content before, but (via
Slashdot), their
interview with Richard Stallman is illuminating of his mindset:
Talking to the Mailman.
His attitude toward the "Open Source" movement and a guy we just
linked to:

Open source is an amoral, depoliticized substitute for the free-software movement. It was explicitly started with that intent. It was a reaction campaign, set up in 1998 by Eric Raymond—he’d written ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’—and others, to counter the support we were getting for software freedom. When it started, Eric Raymond called me to tell me about this new term and asked if I wanted to use it. I said, I’ll have to think about it. By the next day I had realized it would be a disaster for us. It meant disconnecting free software from the idea that users deserve freedom. So I rejected it.

Kind of illuminates a point I've made
before:
Stallman's views are fundamentally fueled by his moral system and
his politics, neither being closely held by anyone save a small
group of True Believers. (And why did Ayn Rand pop into my head just
now?)

That's not to say that he's wrong, of course. And (geez) he's
right about a lot of stuff, too. But I wouldn't pass his implicit
ideological/moral purity test.

When asked how he thinks voters will react to Question 2 on Election Day if they’ve never seen or heard of it before, Kurk said it should be an intuitive experience.

“When someone reads this, I would think they would say, ‘Boy, I’m glad somebody did this, because I don’t want the government snooping in my DNA and my information when they have no public purpose in doing so.’ “

Cushing hopes the amendment will draw support from across the political spectrum because of the “Live Free or Die” ethos of Granite Staters.

“I’m hopeful. It’s bipartisan because it speaks to the core of who we are in the state of New Hampshire. The right to liberty is the right to be left alone.”

People have criticized the proposed amendment, alleging "vagueness".
Cushing and Kurk say: that's not a bug, it's a feature. (My words,
not theirs.)

URLs du Jour

2018-10-27

For the record, I gave up on World Series Game 4 after 14 full
innings, slightly after 2am this morning.
If I'd only stayed awake for another hour and 20 minutes, I could
have seen… the Red Sox lose, thanks to a walk-off homer in the 18th
inning.

I occasionally browse the website of the University Near Here to see
what mischief my former employer might be up to. Oooh, here's a new
Social Media Policy! Included in the 2018-2019 (PDF) version of
Student
Rights, Rules, & Responsibilities (page 52). First
paragraph is a grabber:

Students have extensive access to social media. Social media offer a variety
of positive experiences and benefits to students, including increased engagement
in the community, increased sense of social connection and sense of
well-being. They also harbor a number of known risks to students’ privacy,
future employment and current well-being. The risks include, but are not
limited to: bullying, harassment, defamation and injury to reputation.
Those risks arhmunication.

I've bolded a word which I found to be … problematic.

This might be fixed at some point; I've sent in a suggested
correction, to replace "arhmunication" with the better known term
"covfefe".

But (at least semi-seriously): what does it say when (apparently)
nobody can bother to proofread the Very Important Social Media
Policy before it's released to the world? If they can't get the
relatively simple stuff right, how likely is it to be logically coherent
policy?

Question 2 aims to protect Granite State residents' privacy rights in the digital age. If approved by voters, the measure would amend the state constitution to say: "An individual's right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential and inherent."

The goal is to ensure that governments get permission before snooping through citizens’ private social media accounts, internet search histories, emails and text messages.

The article also reveals why
I
wasn't able
to find out who voted for
and against the amendment in the NH House.

But state Rep. Timothy Smith, a Democrat who declined to reveal how
he voted in the House's anonymous vote to pass the amendment, says
many of his fellow lawmakers were afraid to oppose it for fear of
appearing anti-privacy, and because they didn't expect it to pass.
He has "serious reservations" about how it's written.

I am embarrassed to say that I didn't even know anonymous voting was
possible in the NH House.

But it's ironic (I think) that our legislators apparently think "privacy"
extends to you not being able to find out how they voted on privacy
matters.

The founder of the world's most widely used database engine ignited a firestorm in the tech community after it was revealed that he had posted a code of conduct for users based on the teachings of the Bible and an ancient order of monks founded by Benedict of Nursia.

You can read it (now renamed "Code of Ethics")
here. After it
was discovered and publicized among the Social Justice Warrior
community, SQLite founder Richard Hipp found himself in a shitstorm
familiar to heretics: how dare you promulgate someone
else's Code of Conduct?

One critic advised Hipp to "seek professional help to avoid this kind of behaviour in the future."
Yes, in the name of tolerance and diversity, SJWs feel free to
speculate on others' supposed mental dysfunction.

Paula Bolyard's article is strongly recommended, especially to those
who might have any lingering doubts that "Social Justice" is about
anything other than grabbing the power to bend others to your will.

Speaking about bending others to one's will, Andrew Cline (at the Josiah
Bartlett Center) writes on
Wayfair
and the New Hampshire Advantage. Bottom line: the recent Supreme Court
decision allowing other states to force New Hampshire businesses to
collect their sales taxes is worse than you (probably) thought.

By eliminating the physical presence standard, Wayfair gives new meaning to the term “the long arm of the law.” Any “nexus” that can arguably connect a business or individual to another state can create a tax liability in that state.

States are already pursuing this, which has the potential of eroding, if not destroying, the New Hampshire Advantage. People move here to avoid income taxes and shop here to avoid sales taxes. If Wayfair creates a de facto national income and sales tax, New Hampshire loses a major competitive advantage over other New England states.

It was a remarkably bad 5-4 decision, with an unusual grouping of
dissenters: Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

If you think you're paying too much for coffee, you've got nothing on the U.S. Air Force, which spent roughly $300,000 just on custom coffee mugs over the course of two years.

A Fox News report alleges that the Air Force spent an exorbitant amount of money on specialty coffee mugs for the 60th Aerial Port Squadron at Travis Air Force base in California. The metal mugs have the ability to reheat beverages while air refueling tankers are in flight. As cool as the feature sounds, the mug's shape makes it highly susceptible to shattering when dropped...which happens frequently. The cost of a single mug has doubled from $693 in 2016 to $1,280 in 2018. At the time of the report, Project On Government Oversight's Dan Grazier said that the mugs' intended purpose of aiding "the crew's alertness by providing caffeine" could be similarly achieved "with a few cans of Red Bull."

Yes, once again: your United States Air Force spends $1280 on a
coffee mug that easily breaks when dropped.

For $1280, you'd expect a mug that senses when it has been dropped and
deploys
Mars
landing airbags.

Socialist Sweden was once beloved by the American left as an enlightened land of high technology, stellar health care and liberal immigration policies. Recently, though, when Swedes decided they had had enough unfettered immigration, they were forgotten by American media.

But not me. I love the Swedes. One of the best men I know is a Swede. They are a people of great hockey. Their thin pancakes and lingonberries are fantastic, and they have a dry sense of humor. Sweden also gave us the mystery writer Stieg Larsson, author of the “Millennium” series. But sadly, Larsson died of a heart attack, having subsisted, it is said, mostly on strong coffee and processed foods.

Just to clarify: John's column is about
The
Ritual, a 2017 British horror film mostly set in Sweden. And
self-microchipping.
And
LFOD comes in here:

We all have choices to make, and free will is still free will. There was an American subculture that once held to the motto “Live free or die.” But now our motto is “Shut up and take it.”

Hm. A good alternative motto for those who find LFOD a little too
aggressive.

URLs du Jour

2018-10-26

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is on my short list for near-automatic
inclusion in these "du Jour" postings. At Reason, she lets
you (and me) know
Why You Are Not a Conservative.

I get this all the time: "Oh Deirdre, you're such a conservative." My friends seem to think politics operates exclusively on a left-right spectrum. They therefore suspect me and other self-described "libertarians" of being sneaky versions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

In truth, libertarians sit nowhere on the left-right map, which merely captures a dispute about how to use the government's monopoly of violence. The right wants to use violence to support 800 U.S. bases abroad. The left wants to use it to boss poor people around. Libertarians want neither.

What is the difference between libertarians and conservatives? It is our unique belief in liberty and its spontaneous ordering, in the way that language or art or science is ordered. We see a world ordered by people having a go within a loose framework of honest rewards. Conservatives (and socialists and most people in the middle) believe in top-down order, as in a loving or authoritarian household.

As someone who coin-flips between describing myself as a libertarian
or conservative, Deirdre provides a lot of food for thought. She
prefers the term "liberal". And she
references Hayek's famous essay
"Why
I am Not a Conservative", in which he makes a plea for "Whig".

Hm, a couple more suggestions, and I could go from coin-flipping to
die-rolling. Or maybe just refrain from self-pigeonholing.

Whether the packages delivered to leading Democrats and liberals
turn out to be functioning bombs or dummy devices intended to send a
message, the effect is largely the same: American politics is
descending further into the logic of the vendetta.

James Madison had already been buried in his Montpelier grave in 1836 when territorial leaders named the place that would become the capital of Wisconsin after him. But it’s safe to presume the “Father of the Constitution” who advocated for the “numerous and indefinite” powers of state governments would have appreciated the honor — at first.

It’s less clear — given the massive infusion of federal money into state capitols and the accompanying loss of local control — that he would be all that pleased today. Federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments have grown from just $7 billion in the 1960s to an estimated $728 billion in 2018. Almost a third of the money in many state government budgets now comes directly from Washington, D.C.

I can attest that, on the ground, incoming Federal cash is widely
perceived as "free money".

For people who want to look at the data,
this
seems to be the latest and greatest from Pew (Pew! Pew!) Charitable
Trusts. (Caveat: There are a lot of other ways to look at the numbers.)
For my fellow Granite Staters: New Hampshire seems to be
depressingly normal, with 31.9% of its budget coming from DC. This
is pretty close to the all-50-states value (32.6%). The numbers
range from 43.3% (Mississippi) to 21.1% (Virginia).

Our key concern with the model policy is this: It seeks to deputize a nearly unlimited range of intermediaries—from social media platforms to payment processors to domain name registrars to chat services—to police a huge range of speech. According to these recommendations, if a company helps in any way to make online speech happen, it should monitor that speech and shut it down if it crosses a line.

This is a profoundly dangerous idea, for several reasons.

I bet you can think of three or four reasons yourself.

A fun site from Merriam-Webster:
Time Traveler.
Set up to answer the burning question:

When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year.

Most people seem to be using it on their birth years. And for
myself… whoa, "Murphy's Law". That figures.

URLs du Jour

2018-10-25

Our Amazon Product du Jour is brought to you on the recommendation
of
Dave
Barry's
blog, where it's claimed that "some of the photos are NSFW",
especially if you work at PETA or NOW.

I have not made a big deal out of my mild Red Sox fandom. (Since the
1975 World Series, and Pudge Fisk's arm-waving homer in game six,
should you care. So I've been through many sucky years with them.)

Every single member of the organization, all the way down to whoever
cuts the outfield grass at Fenway, has my undying gratitude for
their stellar season.

Savvy readers of this blog (yes, all eight of you) have heard this rant before. That Alex Cora didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and end up on Lansdowne. The man won a World Series with the Red Sox in 2007 and the Astros in 2017 and he knows a thing or two about the game. He’s a thinker and a schemer, and everything that has transpired thus far in the Red Sox’ season has done so according to his design. For all we know, the stock market may rise and fall on his every whim.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that second guessing the man is a fool’s errand, despite the fact that second guessing the manager of the Boston Red Sox is the single most popular pastime in New England. Whether you’re an MIT professor or a seasoned gambler who isn’t afraid to try betting on sports to earn a living, you’ll never unlock the riddle wrapped in an enigma that is Alex Cora’s brain.

I can only hope that Craig Kimbrel's will-he-blow-the-save antics don't land me in the
hospital.

Even though states, unlike the federal government, have police powers, states’ hate crime laws also are problematic on policy grounds. They mandate enhanced punishments for crimes committed as a result of, or at least when accompanied by, particular states of mind that the government disapproves. The law holds us responsible for controlling our minds, which should control our conduct. The law always has had, and should have, the expressive function of stigmatizing particular kinds of conduct. But hate crime laws treat certain actions as especially reprehensible because the persons committing them had odious (although not illegal) frames of mind. Such laws burden juries with the task of detecting an expanding number of impermissible motives for acts already criminalized. And juries must distinguish causation (a particular frame of mind causing an act) from correlation (the person who committed the act happened to have this or that mentality). So, even if the HCPA were not unconstitutional, it would be unwise.

Crimes are very seldom committed by people with admirable motives.
Distinguishing which mental states are especially deserving of extra
punishment is moral grandstanding.

Today on Facebook I read a comment from someone saying he hates America because so many Americans are apathetic about politics and current events. (He didn’t offer any comparative stats about apathy in other countries, so I don’t know how much he also hates Canadians, Mexicans, or the Swiss. Presumably, he despises almost everyone in the world, since very few people are highly engaged.)

The argument seems to be something like this: Horrible things are happening everyday. If you are either A) unaware of those things or B) aware of them but not outraged by them, then you must be a bad person. After all, good people have the right kind of knowledge and have the right emotional responses to things. The right response to horrible injustice is immense outrage. The right response to tragedy is immense sadness.

Is it, though? On the contrary, continuous outrage or sadness is often a sign of pathological narcissism.

Where were we? Oh yeah, talking about how the politicization of everyday life turns people into monsters. Politics is mostly zero sum, meaning one side wins and the other loses and just has to eat it. From a classical liberal perspective, this is one of the main reasons that politics should be squeezed into as small a corner as possible, reserved for those few things that require forced consensus (courts, law enforcement, taxes, some roads and schools). Most parts of life are more voluntary and open-ended, with exit being a prime option. If you don't like somebody's restaurant or store, you can just go elsewhere. If you don't like the reigning party's tax policy, you still have to pay up.

It might seem odd for this politics-obsessed blog to say (but it's
really not): making "everything about
politics" is a dysfunctional mental state.

Amid the shockwaves of condemnation that followed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a number of conservatives have been upset not at the savagery inflicted on the expatriate Saudi dissident and journalist, but at the widespread outrage over his grisly death. Some have openly disparaged Khashoggi, deriding him as an Islamist who supported the Muslim Brotherhood and palled around with Osama bin Laden. Others have mocked his calls for liberal reform as "a cover" for his "real work" of praising terrorists and attacking Israel.

Their claims are outdated and/or exaggerated. But even if they had merit, why assault the reputation of someone who did nothing to deserve such a horrifying death? Why seek to dampen the infamy of the Saudis' repugnant crime?

We could all use a little more introspection. Self included, of
course.

Indeed, the pre-Trump EPA spent much of the last 25 years building the case that PM (soot and dust) in outdoor air is virtually the most lethal substance known to man. Obama EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified in 2011 to Congress that, “Particulate Matter causes premature deaths. It doesn’t make you sick. It is directly causal to dying sooner than you should.” She pegged the annual death toll due to PM in outdoor air at 570,000 – about 1-in-5 deaths in the U.S. Alleged deaths caused by PM was how the Obama EPA justified all its war-on-coal rules.

But my new analysis, just published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entirely debunks the notion that PM in outdoor air kills anyone at all.

I have no idea whether Milloy is right, but his claims deserve to be
taken seriously. He's got some pretty damning details about the
genesis of EPA's PM standards. I'm sure, however, that his claims
will be (a)
largely ignored and (b) to the extent they are not ignored, be subject to
ad hominem attacks.

On the cover of the 22 October New Yorker: an unflattering
caricature of rich men in suits. On the inside cover and first page:
a two-page spread advertising suits for rich men. pic.twitter.com/xmKmXQBCer

Green code in Japanese-inspired symbols trails down a computer screen like digital rain. It tells those who can read it what's happening in The Matrix, a virtual reality.

Simon Whiteley, creator of The Matrix code, attributes the design to his wife, who's from Japan.

"I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," says Whiteley, a production designer from England who's now based at the Animal Logic animation and visual-effects studio in Sydney. He scanned the characters from his wife's Japanese cookbooks. "Without that code, there is no Matrix."

Mandatory national service is not just another policy proposal. It
is an idea that undermines one of the fundamental principles of a
free society: that people own themselves and their labor. We are not
the property of the government, of a majority of the population, or
of some employer. Mandatory national service is a frontal attack on
that principle, because it is a form of forced labor - literally so.
Millions of people would be forced to do jobs required by the
government on pain of criminal punishment if they disobey. Under
most proposals, they would have to perform this forced labor for
months or even years on end.

We rightly abhor the extensive use of forced labor by authoritarian
regimes, such as those of the Nazis and the communists. The same
principle applies to democratic governments. The fact that a
violation of fundamental human rights may have the support of a
majority of the population does not make it just. Wrong does not
become right merely because a large number of people support it.

Apparently mandatory national service is an idea whose heart nobody's managed to
put a stake through yet.
(See, for example,
this
USA Today story
from last year.)

Dude, it's the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Mandatory
National Service.

In Brooklyn, there is an occult bookshop called Catland Books.
“Catland” is, one imagines, an apt description of the homes of the
women who congregate there.

The operators of the establishment have announced that they are planning to hold a special hex session this weekend to make Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh “suffer.” It is sure to be a popular event.

Because progressives belong to the Party of Science, they may wish to visit some of their like-minded fellow partisans at Catland Books, where they can also take a few courses: Demonology 101, Plant Magik [sic] 101, or Potions & Tinctures 101, which all are on the current schedule. Everything seems to be 101 — that’s a lot of introductory classes, a lot of foreplay for a master’s course in horsesh**.

Apparently the NR style guide disallows "horseshit". Why?

Anyway, KDW calls this, accurately, "the 21st-century progressive
version of a cross-burning". Fortunately, our
local
spook shop doesn't appear to be political at all.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said during a debate with her Republican challenger on Sunday that she took a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry in order to rebuild public trust in government.

Journalist Carrie Saldo, the debate moderator, asked Warren why she decided to release the results of her DNA test when she said months ago in an interview that the issue of her ancestry was "settled."

"One of the things I see now is that confidence in government is at an all time low. I believe one way we try to rebuild confidence is through transparency," Warren said at her second debate in three days against Republican Geoff Diehl. "So I've really made an effort over the past several months."

I feel much more confidence in government now that… no, wait, I
don't.

If you believe a midterm election in a time of relative peace and
economic prosperity is the most important in history, or even the
most important in your incredibly fortunate lifetime, you’re either
oblivious to basic history or you don’t have a single non-partisan
synapse firing in your skull. We might ask people to please stop
being so melodramatic and conceited, but then, it’s 2018.

“We have had many important elections, but never one so important as that now approaching,” a New York Times editorial claimed during the 1864 presidential race between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan, which took place during the Civil War. As others have noted, this probably the last time that the words “most,” “important,” “election,” and “lifetime” should have been stuck together.

As the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band
observed:
No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In.

Self-awareness is a virtue. And in a country where James Franco is a working professor, and Oreos masquerade as poultry, a little candor is always a good thing. Fortunately, we can take cues from the state of Nebraska, which launched a new, delightfully deadpan slogan this week: “Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”

I lived in Nebraska for a good chunk of my formative years, love it
dearly. But once you've been to the Henry Doorly Zoo, taken in a
College World Series game, and … um … seen Chimney Rock, what's
left? Just a good place to live.

This week, the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee released a ludicrous taxpayer-funded “study” that attempts to prove that the entire budget deficit is the fault of Republicans. The report uses a hyper partisan methodology that essentially rigs the results.

The study’s argument is as follows: Since 2000, defense spending has risen $205 billion above inflation, and tax cuts have shaved $546 billion from annual tax revenues. Add in $183 billion in resulting interest costs, and you get a $935 billion annual tab that exceeds the current $779 billion budget deficit. Therefore, in the study’s words, “Republican policies caused the 2018 budget deficit.”

My own reasoning is simpler, and not funded by a dime in taxes:

Republicans control the House, and have done so since 2011.

Republicans control the Senate, and have done so since 2015.

A (nominal) Republican is President, and has been President
since 2017.

Not a dime of Federal government "discretionary" spending can
occur without the OK of the House and Senate.

Also under the control of the House and Senate (with
Presidential approval): "mandatory"
spending and taxes.

Therefore, Republican policies (as revealed by the votes of
Republican politicians) are responsible for the entire budget
deficit.

According to Nancy Pelosi, Republicans in Washington “are setting in motion their plan to destroy the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that seniors and families rely on.” She’s distorting comments by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who actually said that while he would like to see reforms to those programs, they will not happen with Congress and the White House both controlled by Republicans. Republicans aren’t planning to cut Medicare and Social Security.

The truth is worse: They’re not planning to do much of anything at all.

The best Republicans can do is to claim that they're … um … not
Democrats. Give them points for that, anyway.

In 1981, the socialist economist and best-selling author Robert Heilbroner took to the pages of the democratic socialist magazine, Dissent, to answer what would seem like a rather academic question, "What is Socialism?" His answer was a raw, honest, and devastating critique of democratic socialism from a man wrestling with his faith. In his essay, Heilbroner—reminiscent of a similar definitional debate today among progressives and socialists—explained that socialism is not a more generous welfare state along Nordic lines. Instead, it is something entirely different, an economic and cultural configuration that suppresses if not eliminates the market economy and the alienating and selfish culture it produces.

"If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation," Heilbroner wrote. "Indeed, that is what planning means. Command by planning need not, of course, be totalitarian. But an aspect of authoritarianism resides inextricably in all planning systems. A plan is meaningless if it is not carried out, or if it can be ignored or defied at will."

As (I'm pretty sure) Hayek pointed out, scapegoats will be found for the failures of socialist
schemes: the dissenters.

Andrew Cline, writing for the Josiah Bartlett Center, looks at the
speech James Dean gave on his installation as President of the
University Near Here. He especially liked that it was based on New
Hampshire's motto.
Speeches of freedom.

In an era when college students routinely pressure administrators to
silence voices that challenge their own preconceptions, it is
notable and praiseworthy that UNH’s new president committed himself
in his inaugural speech to upholding freedom of speech and of
religion.

President Dean based most of his speech on FDR’s famous Four
Freedoms, which is not the foundation on which we would build any
talk about freedom. FDR’s revision of our founding principles was a
political ploy to revive a dying New Deal and prepare the country
for a more energetic U.S. role in foreign affairs. That it is now
treated as the touchstone for discussions about American liberty is
unfortunate.

Nevertheless, President Dean’s speech was encouraging. If we’re all talking about how to secure, protect and advance freedom, those who are passionately dedicated to weakening, diminishing and shrinking it will consistently find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

As has been said before: UNH is doing a decent job of talking the
free-speech talk. We'll see about the walking the walk bit.

When Republicans proposed a December 2017 amendment to a congressional higher education bill that would bar universities from punishing students who join single-gender social groups, the legislation seemed explicitly targeted at Harvard — but it wasn’t quite that simple.

It was unclear at the time whether the bill, a suggested revision to the Higher Education Act, actually applied to the College. The legislation — titled the PROSPER Act — refers only to “recognized” social groups. But Harvard’s controversial sanctions, which took effect with the Class of 2021, only penalize members of “unrecognized” single-gender social organizations.

The advocacy group is the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education (FIRE), and (unsurprisingly) they think it's a bad idea
for places like Harvard to
blacklist
students who choose to belong to frowned-upon organizations.

Sgt. Ann Marie Guerra, the second-in-command at the 72nd Precinct
Detectives Squad, flipped out on Detective Victor Falcon when he
complained about her leaving her underwear all over the unisex
locker room, sources said.

“They are f–king clean!” the 38-year-old married mom of two
allegedly roared Oct. 7 — as she shoved a pair of her panties into
Falcon’s mouth, a source said.

Although I would like to see the expression on Tom Selleck's face as
Garrett explains the situation to him.

Maggie Hassan: Help Us, We're Stupid

(A Pun Salad Rerun)

[Pun Salad is still in "encore presentation" status. This one isn't very
old, from August of this year.]

Our state's junior senator, Maggie Hassan, is one of the co-sponsors of
the
Rent
Relief Act of 2018; she recently took to the
op-ed
pages
of my local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat to advocate for
its passage. Let's take a look… ooh, the beginning is not promising:

Too many families are working hard and doing all the right things, yet still find themselves struggling to afford the basics needed to thrive.

Maggie puts herself firmly in favor of hard work and doing all the right
things. And families. And thriving. A brave stance!

But on to the topic at hand:

While there are many factors squeezing families’ bottom lines, one
challenge that is particularly pronounced in Rockingham County is the
shortage of affordable housing.

The numbers are stark. A recent study from the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority showed that the median cost for a two-bedroom apartment has increased 19 percent over the last five years. The average hourly wage a household must earn in our state in order to afford the fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental is the 14th highest in the country. And to afford the median two-bedroom rent in Rockingham County – $1,456 a month – a renter would have to earn $58,200 a year.

You can read the cited report from the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority
here.
Maggie's other numbers are from a report by the National Low Income
Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an advocacy group "dedicated solely to achieving
socially just public policy that assures people with the lowest incomes
in the United States have affordable and decent homes." And you can read
that report
here.
(Preface by Bernie Sanders, in case you were harboring any doubts where
the NLIHC lies politically.)

Maggie is against people having to make difficult choices. Another bold
stance!

Could we get on with it, please?

The lack of affordable housing also has a major impact on our businesses. I have heard from business owners across our state who have said that they face real challenges with hiring and retaining employees because workers are struggling to find housing that they can afford.

Well, gadzooks. Apparently, Maggie faced a difficult choice herself. She
could have said to the business owners, "Gee, I guess you'll have
to pay higher wages to attract and retain workers, right?"

But I guess she punted on that. Her solution instead is…

To strengthen economic opportunity, it is clear that hard-working families need relief from the rising cost of rent, which is why I have joined with colleagues to introduce the Rent Relief Act of 2018.

Yes, that seems to be the first response: let's get more people
dependent on government "solutions".

Under this legislation, those who live in rental housing and pay more than 30 percent of their gross income on rent, including utilities, would be eligible for a refundable tax credit. This assistance would be given on a sliding scale based on income and would phase out at high income levels. Those struggling to afford high rent would qualify for the tax credit by determining the total amount spent yearly on rent, taking into account the family’s annual income, and the federal government’s established fair market rent rates for the area.

OK, that's enough from Maggie. Let's look at some contrary views.
It's not all from us right-wing troglodytes. For example:

I know there is a big debate about how left the Dems should go.

But can we at least agree that Dems shouldn't do stupid policies that will dramatically raise rents on everyone, at enormous taxpayer cost, without improving conditions of poor people? https://t.co/et5UtiEL58

Adam Davidson is a New Yorker writer. Not exactly a free market
fundamentalist. I found that tweet via an article written by Henry
Grabar in (of all places) Slate. Among Grabar's criticisms:

The policy would also create some perverse incentives for tenants and landlords alike, potentially driving up rents as landlords seek to maximize government aid. One precedent for this can be found in the Section 8 policy, where the level of federal subsidy does indeed appear to warp local markets. In 2000, HUD raised its funding limit from the 40th percentile of regional rent to the 50th. Instead of opening up new, more expensive neighborhoods to voucher recipients, the policy wound up “artificially inflating rents in some higher-poverty neighborhoods” where voucher recipients are concentrated. In high-cost cities, the Harris plan would be such a fire hose of cash that the effect would likely be to raise rents citywide—with landlords as the primary beneficiaries. You can see how the plan might spiral out of control. Rising rents would boost the region’s Fair Market Rent, triggering more subsidy. And so on.

My major criticism: Maggie is proposing a Federal solution to a problem
that is mostly our own fault. I've pointed out the Cato Institute
study
Freedom in the 50
States before, but it's particularly relevant on this topic. New
Hampshire gets very high marks overall, but…

New Hampshire’s regulatory outlook is not so sunny. Its primary sin is exclusionary zoning. It is generally agreed that the Granite State is one of the four worst states in the country for residential building restrictions.

I.e., an artificially restricted housing supply. Of course
housing prices will be high here. Again, why should taxpayers in Iowa
and Montana save us from our own self-inflicted stupidity?

The only bright side is that there's a consensus that the bill is going
nowhere. Why was it proposed in the first place? That Slate
article linked above has a credible answer:

For Dems, this new focus on the concerns of the base makes a cynical kind of sense. Renters’ costs have abated somewhat since 2016—when this issue played no role in a marathon presidential campaign—but Democrats are newly aware that their Achilles’ heel is voter turnout. Young Americans, left-leaning and vote-shy, are locked out of homeownership by record-high home prices and low incomes, and struggling with rising rents. That is, if they’ve managed to get their own place: A record share live with parents or relatives. A record share also live with friends or strangers. Historically speaking, this is not normal: Nearly half of American renters are cost-burdened today, paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent, up from a quarter in the 1960s. And while the problem is most severe for low-income families, it persists up the wage ladder to include, in the most expensive cities, households making six figures.

A video of UNH’s Alpha Phi chapter singing the n-word in Kanye West’s
“Gold Digger” went viral in September, sparking a campus-wide
conversation around First Amendment rights and freedom of
speech.

After the video was posted on the “All Eyes on UNH” Facebook page on
Sept. 19, Dean of Students Ted Kirkpatrick sent an email to the student
body condemning the use of the word and stated that the university was
investigating the matter.

We discussed the imbroglio
here
a few weeks back. The article relates the abrupt about-face regarding
the Dean-promised "investigation":

In a follow-up email on Sept. 21, Kirkpatrick corrected that assertion,
stating that “this is a matter of common decency, not law,” and that the
sorority was not under investigation by the university. The email also
included an apology letter from Alpha Phi chapter president, Megan
Shields.

“The University of New Hampshire remains fully committed to the First Amendment,” Kirkpatrick wrote.

Cooler heads eventually prevailed, in other words, probably after some
panicked legal advice was offered. But it's still
grimly amusing that Dean Kirkpatrick's first reaction to students singing
a
Grammy-winning song was to threaten an "investigation".

But that was weeks ago. Let's move on, because it gets worse:

The First Amendment of the Constitution grants citizens the freedom to exercise religion and free speech. However, no right is absolute, and every right comes with responsibilities, says Kathy Kiely, a UNH lecturer in journalism.

"No right is absolute" is a trite truism. But the limits on
Constitution-protected speech are known relatively well. I recommend the
First
Amendment Library at the website of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education (FIRE), or the
First
Amendment FAQ at the website of the Newseum Institute.

Beyond that, Kiely is clearly out of her Constutional depth.
"Every right comes with responsibilities" is meaningless, vapid
claptrap. It's a bromide tossed out exclusively by people who want the
power to
erode your rights. (I suppose they think the alliteration makes
it seem profound. Like "trite truism".)

But Kiely has more, by which I mean "even worse":

“As a journalist, I’ve never felt I have the right to say whatever I want just because I have First Amendment protections,” Kiely said. “The right to speak truth to power doesn’t give us all a license to be ignorant and hurtful.”

Sorry, Ms. Kiely: the First Amendment
does grant journalists—and everyone else, for that
matter—a legal right to be "ignorant and
hurtful". You can say just about any stupid or insulting thing you want
in a newspaper, a magazine, on a soapbox in the town square—or, ahem, your blog—and you will not get in
legal trouble for it. (Within the well-defined limits mentioned by the
references above: libel, kiddy porn, blackmail, etc.)

[Update: I said "grant" above. That's not right. The FA
recognizes and protects rights; it does not "grant" them. Sorry.]

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I think being "ignorant
and hurtful" is a bad idea, and you shouldn't do it. But, simply said, you have the
right to be wrong.

As far as "ignorant and hurtful" goes, it seems that Kathy Kiely is (a) pretty ignorant about Constitutional
law, and it is (b) sort of hurtful (at least to my sensibilities) that she's
in a position to spread her ignorance to UNH
students. Her smug reference to "speak[ing] truth to power" is
especially galling when she hasn't even got the "speaking truth" part
down pat yet.

[Smugness is a theme with Ms. Kiely. Her
UNH
profile quotes: "My goal as a journalism teacher is very
modest — to save civilization as we know it." Eeesh.]

And she keeps going downhill, because it's a slippery slope:

Our system of government also operates on check and balances, Kiely
points out, and the 14th Amendment grants that citizens may not be
deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Hate
speech is speech that might deprive others of that right, she says.

If Kiely had been paying attention back in high school, she might have
remembered that "checks and balances" refers to the delegation of power
among branches of government, not the exercise of rights. And the
relevance of the Fourteenth Amendment is actually that it expands the
First's "Congress shall make no law" language and extends it to
(specifically) public universities. Like UNH.

Kiely either didn't know this, or didn't mention it to the reporter.
Which is worse?

“I would just ask the free-speech-at-all-cost advocates to consider how they might feel if it were their life and their liberty in the balance,” Kiely said.

Well, it's all about how you feel, isn't it?

I would just ask Ms. Kiely: what would she think—not "feel"—would
be the disadvantages of having UNH administrators hold sway over the
academic careers of lowly students who run afoul of the Speech Policers.
For extra credit: identify the "power imbalances". And then "speak truth to power".

But at least their publications occasionally make for interesting
reading at the kitchen table. Which is what this post is really about.
The August/September issue of AARP The Magazine (presumably named
to distinguish it from AARP The Motion Picture) contains an
interview with Stanford brain researcher Robert Sapolsky plugging
his new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our
Best and Worst. And this Q-and-A simply leapt out at me:

Um. Wait a minute.

I am sure Sapolsky is a nice guy, a smart guy, and a careful researcher. (Well,
maybe. Truth be told, I have no idea. It seems like a charitable thing to
say though.) But what he says here is just irredeemably stupid and
self-contradictory.

It seems obvious that, in opening up the door to free will in
matters of shirt choice, it's a logical necessity that the door
remains open for other choices too. If you can use free
will to choose your shirt, you can also use it to choose how to spend your time and
resources, who to marry, which career to pursue, your ethical beliefs,
and… well, just about everything important in life.

How Sapolsky can dismiss such things as "uninteresting" is (to
understate it significantly) puzzling.

Yes, I understand that his business is
neuroendocrinology,
and it's true enough that it's "mighty hard to find" free will at
that level.

But that's similar to the very old joke:

Sapolsky's research can't find free will, because it's not where he's
"interested" in looking. But the light is better there.

Now, I've placed Sapolsky's book on my things-to-read list—it's very
well reviewed—and I will
probably get to it someday.

I don't know if it has additional arguments
about free will, but if it does, I will carefully
consider them. I will weigh them against other things I've read. And
then I
will decide…

URLs du Jour

Imagine that you were someone who had had reservations about Donald Trump in 2016 but still preferred him to Herself, being as you likely are a moderate-leaning voter and not especially ideological, perhaps one who found many things to admire about Barack Obama but who thought that he pushed things too far during his administration, exceeding his mandate and causing instability in the process, and that electing Herself was likely to make things worse rather than better. Maybe there were personal things you found distasteful about the Clintons, such as their dynastic ambitions and their jaw-dropping sense of entitlement to national political power. On the other hand, Republicans want to cut taxes and reform regulations, which are things you probably approve of in general; and they’re less likely to create expensive new entitlements (socializing health care, making college “free,” as though those costs weren’t going to be borne by somebody); and their old-fashioned belief that the law pretty much says what it says and judges should stick with that rather than make stuff up on the fly is more appealing than the alternative. You found it relatively easy to imagine President Trump signing those tax-cut bills and maybe putting a leash on the EPA, and you figured that Mike Pence or somebody would whisper the right names in his ear when it came to judicial appointments. Whatever reservations you may have had about Trump, chances are that, if the above is pretty close to what you were thinking in 2016, then you aren’t terribly disappointed.

What the Democrats needed, it seemed, was a way to get those Reluctant Trump Voters to turn into Regretful Trump Voters and join up, however temporarily, with Team Donkey.

From the vantage point of October 2018, I have to wonder: Why on Earth would they?

The Democrats’ outreach to those Reluctant Trump Voters has been peculiar indeed, e.g. insisting that they must have been motivated by racism, that they are closeted (or out-and-proud) white supremacists, that they hate women, that they are motivated by bigotry against Muslims and revulsion against homosexuals, that they are dumb (so surpassingly stupid that they “vote against their own interests,” as the Democratic mantra goes), that they are one moral degree of separation from Heinrich Himmler, if that, etc.

I was not just "reluctant", I didn't vote for Trump at all. But
otherwise, I'm in Camp Kevin:
Democrats aren't giving me any reason to vote for them, though.

In an effort to "combat the opioid crisis" in America, Congress is
calling for a slate of governmental interventions that have been
tried, tested, and shown to cause more harm. In June, the U.S. House
of Representatives passed 50 bills, with more to come, that throw
billions of dollars at already rich universities, hand
responsibility for determining addiction treatment procedures to the
federal government, and allow the U.S. attorney general to ban
vaguely defined substances, among many other clumsy actions. Too
much of the new legislation is grounded in the "overprescription"
hypothesis, which blames the current unprecedented rates of overdose
on an expansion in the number of opioid prescriptions that began in
the 1990s. The consensus around this theory has prompted Congress to
further restrict opioid prescription access.

Judging from the social media posts and campaign ads, pols are proud
to point to various pieces of legislation, initiatives, and programs
to claim that they've "done something". Usually this involves
shoveling money at "professionals" who can (sooner or later) appear in their campaign
ads, testifying to their compassion, empathy, wisdom, etc.

It's a kind of entrepreneurship, I guess: watch for an imminent
social crisis, hype it relentlessly, put yourself forward as part of
the solution, start applying for grants. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Progressive candidates claim to have a platform addressing social
and economic issues – a platform to create a more just, fair, and
equitable America.

Which is a nice thought…

But the Progressive platform is really to create a more political America… to create an America where everything, no matter how intimate and private, is decided by the political process.

“The Personal Is the Political” has been a leftist slogan for 50 years.

Why would anyone want that as a slogan? The idea is completely totalitarian. But the completeness, the totalness of the idea – the “inclusiveness,” as Progressives would say – is the point. When politics encompasses not only public life but private life as well, then there’s a lot more politics… politics without end.

And the Google LFOD alert rang for a very unlikely source, about
10,000 miles from Pun Salad Manor and every other bit of New
Hampshire, where "SMH" stands for Sydney Morning HeraldL
Sydney
Opera House celebrates 45 years as 'Our House'. If you
know one thing about Sydney, it's the profile of the Opera House.
But did you know…

For Building Operations Manager, Dean Jakubowski, the graffiti on
the concrete segments, and the stories they contain, are some of his
favourite secret spots in the building that 10,000 workers of 90
different nationalities helped to construct. There is a cowboy
etched in one segment on the western side of the second largest
shell that contains the Joan Sutherland Theatre, and another that
reads "Live free or die" - the New Hampshire motto in the Green room. And many more names scrawled deep in the shells hidden behind plywood, by the likes of the Brown brothers, builders from Dubbo who moved to Sydney in the 1960s to work at the site.

Can't imagine how that got there. (I was nowhere near Sydney at the
time, and you probably can't prove otherwise.)

At a private event, representatives of various organized crime
groups came forward to request that the press stop referring to them
as "the Mob" because of the negative connotation of the word thanks
to recent political events.

"When people hear about 'the Mob’,” said Joey "the Ice Pick" Polino, "they now think of people mindlessly screeching about some red versus blue political nonsense. No one even understands what those people want, while we in the Mafia are very clear about what we want: money."

Because, as Tony Montana (in our Amazon Product du Jour)
observed
long ago: "In this country, you
gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the
power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women."

URLs du Jour

2018-10-18

Our Amazon Product du Jour is a book I just happened across,
and I'm intrigued by the title. Seems as if God is advertising
Himself as the Most Boring Conversationalist Ever.

"Let me tell you about Malachi, now there was a prophet. But he
could also fish. He would drop his hook in the Sea of Galilee, and
the carp would be lining up to bite. Malachi preferred the tilapia,
though, so he threw a lot of the carp back…"

The legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes had a game called “Calvinball.” The rules were nonsensical to the outsider and the players made up them as they went along, to gain tactical advantage. But the point was that the players were alternating in changing the rules.

In many elite institutions, elite white liberals are used to playing a spoiled-brat version of Calvinball in which only they get to make up the rules. Sometimes the rule is believe the accusers (when the targets are fraternities or Republican nominees). Sometimes — like with Keith Ellison — the rule is pictures or it didn’t happen (sorry, Al Franken). Sometimes colleges need safe spaces, and sometimes armed left-wing militias are an understandable but overenthusiastic response to peaceful, democratic critics.

The key is the relationship of (mostly white, affluent, privileged) activists to authority. They might be students, junior staffers at media companies, or television producers, but they all know that they are part of the in-group and that authority is looking for a pretext to apply the rules in a partisan manner against the out-group. They know that authority is corrupt, and that rules and procedures will be manipulated or ignored to harass the opposition. These expectations of special treatment don’t just disappear when these people leave their institutional playpens.

Because it just really could have been, I believe Warren believes herself to be part Native, that she is one of the millions of Americans who have been told they have Native blood (though often don't); who, while wishcasting for identity, alight on Native American because #motherearth and #nicehair and because Natives tend to put up with white people parachuting in for a perceived spiritual hit.

In my experience, as a 100 percent white person who's spent three decades around Native people—who, also in my experience, usually refer to themselves as American Indians, or simply 'skins—Natives are amazingly tolerant of the wannabes. The woman who comes to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, every year from Germany to visit Grandma for a month but brings with her money and gifts and steaks for the barbecue? She can stay. The little orange-haired girl dancing at the powwow who, when my former brother-in-law asked, "What tribe are you?" answered, "I don't know but Mama knows," forever bequeathed us the "Mamaknows" tribe. My half-Native daughter's classmates who, during the 1997 drought in Los Angeles, suggested she lead them in a rain dance? They were second graders, in thrall to Pocahontas! They danced! And that was fine!

If we self-mythologize when we're young, most of us (who are not politicians) would be too ashamed, or would not see enough benefit, to keep the lies going. (I stopped telling people the Osmonds were my cousins around age 11, about the time a friend said he stopped talking about his "Aunt Raquel.") We don't need little lies anymore to feel special; we develop identities based on accomplishments, on facts, not feelings.

Mistaking wishful fantasies for reality? As Nancy says, it's cute
and understandable when you're young. But Elizabeth Warren is 69
years old, so…

Watching Jeopardy! on live TV on Boston's WBZ TV brings us,
unfortunately, bazillions of ads for and against "Question 1" on the
Massachusetts ballot in November. Because it's now (apparently) the job of the
state to micromanage hospital staffing questions. The WSJ
(probably paywalled) weighs in on
Bad Bedside Manner in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has some of the best medical care in the world, but a ballot measure next month could start its erosion by raising costs and reducing access. The culprit is the Massachusetts Nurses Association.

Question 1 would limit the number of patients assigned to each registered nurse in state hospitals. For instance, in the pediatric, medical and surgery units a nurse would care for no more than four patients. Patients deemed in non-stable condition in the critical or intensive-care units would have their own dedicated nurse, as would mothers in labor and those under anesthesia.

The nurses union claims these rigid ratios will improve the quality of hospital care, which is already terrific. Massachusetts’ health care ranks second in the nation, according to the Commonwealth Fund’s 2018 scorecard. The state has some of the world’s great hospitals, including Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s. The state has 122.4 nurses per 10,000 residents, far more than the national average of 89.6.

Of course this will increase the cost of medical care
generally. And the same people pushing for it will gripe
in clueless
wonder about how things got so expensive.

Rick Stein, 71, of Wilmington was reported missing and presumed dead on September 27, 2018 when investigators say the single-engine plane he was piloting, The Northrop, suddenly lost communication with air traffic control and disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rehoboth Beach. Philadelphia police confirm Stein had been a patient at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital where he was being treated for a rare form of cancer. Hospital spokesman Walter Heisenberg says doctors from Stein's surgical team went to visit him on rounds when they discovered his room was empty. Security footage shows Stein leaving the building at approximately 3:30 Thursday afternoon, but then the video feed mysteriously cuts off. Authorities say they believe Stein took an Uber to the Philadelphia airport where they assume he somehow gained access to the aircraft.

"The sea was angry that day," said NTSB lead investigator Greg Fields in a press conference. "We have no idea where Mr. Stein may be, but any hope for a rescue is unlikely."

Stein's location isn't the only mystery. It seems no one in his life knew his exact occupation.

His daughter, Alex Walsh of Wilmington appeared shocked by the news. "My dad couldn't even fly a plane. He owned restaurants in Boulder, Colorado and knew every answer on Jeopardy. He did the New York Times crossword in pen. I talked to him that day and he told me he was going out to get some grappa. All he ever wanted was a glass of grappa."

And it gets worse. By which I mean: much much better. We can only
hope that we'll go accompanied by such great humor.

Night Work

Another reading project,
catching up with the oeuvre of Steve Hamilton, a fine mystery
writer. His previous books were in the Alex McKnight (ex-ballplayer,
ex-cop, ex-private eye) series, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
This one is a "standalone"; the protagonist/narrator is Joe Trumbell, a
probation officer in upstate New York.

Why yes, I did read two mysteries in a row set in upstate New York. Good
catch.

Joe is kind of a mopey guy; his fiancée, Laurel, was brutally murdered a
couple of years previous. He lives over an old bus station, converted into
a boxing gym. He has a huge collection of jazz records. (And, like a lot
of jazz fans, he can't stop yammering about jazz.)

He decides to try dating once more, however. And he hits it off with his
first blind date, Marlene. But… yes, you saw this coming: Marlene
gets brutally murdered too. Joe is understandably upset, but so is the
local police force, and the NY staties. And (of course) Joe's a suspect.
And the book is written in such a way that I wasn't sure that Joe
shouldn't be a suspect; he pretty clearly has Issues.

The book is kind of long and it feels very, very padded. Not only with the
jazz stuff, but Joe's seeming obsession with describing every building,
every bit of scenery, every bit of room decor… As I've said about other
works, I suspect Hamilton's book
contract specified a certain number of pages be delivered.

Still, it works well as a thriller, and I certainly sped through it to
find out what happened and whodunit.

Deneen chronicles how individualism was once understood as both the culmination of, and dependent on, virtue. The law was conceived of as a device, a technology, for making the virtuous path easier. But it was always understood that liberty comes with obligations. As the line goes in “America the Beautiful,” Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.

This idea, which I write about at length in my book, recognized that the great enemy of virtue and individualism rightly understood is human nature itself. Classical liberalism is very different from classical or pagan libertinism. Adam Smith and John Locke never wrote anything like, “If it feels good, do it.” This is why I placed so much importance in my book on the idea of “God-fearing.” A free society, in which people act as if God is always judging them, will look very different from a free society in which the only god you care about is your own gut.

If Facebook is concerned about a growing chorus of accusations that the social media giant suppresses some voices and elevates others in accord with the company's prevailing political biases, that's not obvious in the firm's latest purge of political pages and accounts.

On Thursday, October 11, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager, announced the company was shutting down 559 pages and 251 accounts "created to stir up political debate." Allegedly, the targets were guilty of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" intended "to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing." The targeted pages and accounts included many pages, and their administrators, who have gained popularity by voicing ideas outside the mainstream—including skepticism of violent and intrusive police tactics and support for libertarian ideas.

Facebook/Twitter rules seem to be vague and applied unevenly. That's
their business, but it's a bad way to run a business.

Despite my best efforts, I know exactly what Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s post-punk indie band from the mid-’90s sounds like (not as bad as you’d think!). At the same time, I don’t know much about Senate candidate Josh Hawley, who is 38 years old (meaning, around eight years younger than “rising star” Beto), the attorney general of Missouri, and the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

In fact, Hawley’s name recognition outside of his state is probably negligible. When his name does come up in national political coverage, it’s mostly as a tack-on in pieces accessing opponent Claire McCaskill’s latest face-saving move or a panicky story about voter registration in Missouri. As with most other Americans, I don’t have any idea if Hawley likes to air drum to The Who when he pretends to win a debate. What I do know is that Hawley is slightly leading McCaskill, a two-time incumbent, in the RealClearPolitics poll average in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate.

The classic
Instapunditry
applies: Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines.

In fact, Microsoft would never have happened without Paul. In December 1974, he and I were both living in the Boston area—he was working, and I was going to college. One day he came and got me, insisting that I rush over to a nearby newsstand with him. When we arrived, he showed me the cover of the January issue of Popular Electronics. It featured a new computer called the Altair 8800, which ran on a powerful new chip. Paul looked at me and said: “This is happening without us!” That moment marked the end of my college career and the beginning of our new company, Microsoft. It happened because of Paul.

In December 1974, I was a freezing physics grad student about 70
miles north of Cambridge, also looking longingly at those clunky,
cheap
microcomputers. You can see the cover and a blurry few pages of the
magazine Bill Gates cites
here.

Relatively cheap, that is. The "can be built for
under $400"
Altair 8800
was slightly north of $2K in 2018 dollars.
Not feasible for a UNH grad student. And you'd have to add at least
a teletype (1500 1974-dollars) or CRT terminal onto that… and some kind of mass storage…
I see from the Wikipedia page that was probably an audio cassette
interface (S-100 bus board $128 kit, $174 assembled).

As reflected in its official state motto, no state has unequivocally embraced the principles of liberty and privacy more than the state of New Hampshire. These ideals make up the core of the state’s philosophical DNA. It is therefore surprising that New Hampshire is conspicuously missing from the list of the 10 diverse states that have explicitly enshrined the right to privacy in their constitutions. But on Election Day, Granite State voters will have a chance to remedy that oversight.

Let's pass on the mindset that had the authors, an ACLU writer and
Neal Kurk (a NH state rep from Weare) write "10 diverse states"
instead of "10 other states". Should a state right to privacy be
enshrined in the NH Constitution? My sample ballot reads:

“Are you in favor of amending the first part of the constitution by
inserting after article 2-a a new article to read as follows:
[Art.] 2-b. [Right to Privacy.] An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural,
essential, and inherent.”
(Passed by the N.H. House 235 Yes 96 No; Passed by State Senate 15 Yes 9 No) CACR 16

The nine Senate votes against the amendment were
all
Democrats. (One Dem, Martha Fuller Clark, voted in favor.)

The House passed the proposed amendment 235-96, but I can't find a
party breakdown.

Seems like a good idea, in other words.
But also see Bad ACLU, arguing for Harvard's right to racially
discriminate in its admissions:

This is astounding. An ACLU tweet argues that ending
discrimination against Asians is bad because it will benefit whites,
while the embedded audio recording argues the opposite. https://t.co/5CC7RbwW0E

Some Buried Caesar

I can remember why I put this book on the
TBR
pile: at some point in the distant past, I came across a list of
Roger Zelazny's favorite mystery novels. I resolved to read the ones I
hadn't read already.

But that was long ago. I'm pretty sure this was the last book on
the list. I can't, however, find that list now. And I don't remember
what other books were on it. Ah, well.

I've read a lot of Chandler, Hammett, etc., but I had so far avoided Rex
Stout's novels featuring his detective Nero Wolfe. I had picked up some
general conceptions, more or less accurate, involving obesity, orchids,
reclusiveness, and his dependence on Archie Goodwin for footwork and
occasional fisticuffs.

So this book is a little unusual, because Wolfe and Archie are out of
New York City, headed up to show Wolfe's prize orchids at the (apparently
fictional) "North Atlantic Exposition" in upstate New York. A freak auto
accident strands them in the countryside, and while making their way to
a nearby farmhouse, they run afoul of a local prize bull, which goes
under the name Hickory Caesar Grindon.

Such is the nature of contrived mystery books: the bull is owned by an
NYC restaurateur named Pratt, who acquired him under contentious
circumstances. Adding to the controversy: Pratt intends to butcher the
bull for ths publicity value, outraging the locals and the former owner.

A large bet is made that this won't happen. And soon enough one
of the bettors is found gorily dead inside Caesar's corral. But did
Caesar do it, or…

This didn't grab me enough to start devouring Nero Wolfe novels, a
little too gimmicky. And it's one of those books where they throw the
suspects at you all at once, and wish you good luck keeping everyone
straight.
But the details of its time and place (late 1930s America) are kind
of interesting. Archie is a fun narrator, but (unfortunately) some of
his prose seems to be dated enough to be incomprehensible to my ears.

The Practicing Stoic

A Philosophical User's Manual

The author was invited to the Volokh Conspiracy recently to plug
this book.
I was intrigued enough to put in an Interlibrary Loan request for it;
and up it came from Brown University, where apparently there aren't a
lot of Stoic-curious students. Want to see if you'd be lured in as
well? Those posts are
here,
here,
here,
here,
and
here.

I'm pretty sure this will go on my top ten list for this year.

The author, Ward Farnsworth (Dean of The University of Texas School of
Law) has done a masterful job of presenting, and advocating for,
Stoic philosophy. (My previous exposure: Tom Wolfe's A Man In
Full, back in the previous century.)

Farnsworth's method is "progressive", but—whew!—not in a political
sense. He starts with foundational building blocks, works upward to more
advanced topics that follow from those basics. The text relies heavily
on quoted snippets
from the biggies: Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, with a host of
"guest speakers": Kant, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, et
al. This works pretty well: we see things in a logical, topical,
order; easier to take than trying to digest each philosopher's thoughts
in the order in which he wrote them.

What you'll notice immediately: the Stoics were a lively and observant
bunch. Their insights into human nature are revelatory and not at all
dated. Yes, Seneca lived 20 centuries ago. Guess what? Humans still
behave and think pretty much the same way as they did back then.
Their remarks remain trenchant and not without humor.
As an example, here's
Seneca, from the "Death" chapter:

Does it do any harm to a good man to be smeared by unjust gossip?
Then we should not let the same sort of thing do damage to death,
either, in our judgment; for death also has a bad reputation, but none
of those who malign death have tried it.

Doesn't that tickle your funny bone a little? Worked for me, anyway.

There's a downside of getting such a book at the library. It deserves to
be studied and re-read every so often. I didn't find myself agreeing in
places, but I may have been reading too superficially.

Why should we be proud of our state botto of 'Live Free or
Die' if it compels state government to let the absolute freedom
of a few compromise the well being of the rest?

… well, it doesn't really matter what particular policy he's arguing
for, does it? Once you buy into the notion that individual rights
can, indeed must, be trampled underfoot when some imaginary
"common good" is to be imposed by politicians, you've pretty much
given the whole game away.

Pappas's conclusion:

In New Hampshire, we have transformed the revolutionary catch phrase
of General Stark into a pithy political slogan used to defeat good
public policies that could help create a freer, more forward-looking
state. We should let our politically charged motto slip into the
night like the Old Man and pick a new mantra that calls each of us
to do better by each other, not just ourselves.

That this latest increase in the deficit happened during a period when Republicans had full control of the federal government reveals that they were never very serious about balancing the budget. Even now, they refuse to recognize the problem. Democrats, meanwhile, are promising to spend even more on entitlements, if and when they return to power.

According to the
Treasury
Department press release (which is, of course, full of happy-face spin),
between FY2017 and FY2018, government receipts were up by a hair,
$3.315 Trillion to 3.329 Trillion, a 0.4% increase. But outlays
ballooned from $3.981 Trillion to $4.108 Trillion, up by a solid
3.2%.

George Orwell saw night descending on us in 1984. Orwell was, on paper, a radical, but in his heart he was an old-fashioned English liberal. He dreamed of socialism but feared socialists. He feared them because he knew them. I was in the sixth grade in 1984, but I remember the magazine covers and pundit panels, and the insistence that though we had not arrived at dystopia on Orwell’s schedule, that eternal jackboot was sure to find our face soon enough. Tom Wolfe joked that “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe,” which wasn’t quite right: There’s Saudi Arabia, and China, and Burma . . .

But not here. And, increasingly, not there, either. As our friends at HumanProgress.Org remind us (to little thanks — nobody is less popular than an optimist) the world has in fact become more democratic and more liberal since 1984, rather than more autocratic and more illiberal. Orwell was the better writer and the more profound thinker, but Aldous Huxley was the better prophet.

Fine, but between you and me I found the guy who wrote
The End Is Near and It's Going to be Awesome a tad more
convincing.

Paul and Scott have joined in the general hilarity over Elizabeth Warren’s disclosure that she might be something like 1/1,000 Native American. (Then again, she might not be. There is so little Native American DNA in the database that several Latin American countries, including Mexico, are used as proxies. Warren may have a better claim to being Hispanic than Indian.) It turns out that Warren likely has less Native American blood than the average white American. Not to mention the wag who noted that she has more bourbon in her blood than Warren has Indian. But Warren doggedly sticks to the one-drop rule that her Democratic forbears promulgated in the antebellum South. Good for her!

Here’s the point: Warren’s defense of her claim to being Native American is good for America. Because if Warren is an Indian, then so are most of the rest of us. And most of us are also African-American or Hispanic. If everyone is an Indian, then no one is an Indian. This logic is fatal to the whole corrupt affirmative action enterprise.

If you go back far enough (as I've said repeatedly, and tiresomely,
in the past) we're all African-American.

But Senator Warren joins a long line of Democrats pushing for
the
one-drop
rule.

Shortly after Elizabeth Warren released a DNA test that may or may not show that she is 1/1024th Native American, failed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed the results of a recent DNA test that conclusively proved she is only 50% Reptilian.

￼
The test, conducted by a renowned DNA expert, showed that only 50% of her blood comes from reptilian humanoids from space bent on destroying humanity. Many Washington insiders had claimed she was 100% reptile, but these claims are now known to be a hoax.

URLs du Jour

They make this accusation now? This is a man who voluntarily signed on to the constant drama circus that is life married to a Kardashian. This is a man whose surname is West — and then chose to name his daughter “North.” This is a man who recorded his debut single with his jaw wired shut after a car accident. This is a man who announced plans to run for president in 2020 back in 2015. This is a man who promoted his sneakers with nude models. This is a man who staged a “fashion show” on Roosevelt Island in New York City where most of the models were wearing translucent outfits and some fainted in the stifling heat.

This is a man who stormed out of the American Music Awards after
he didn’t win in 2004; declared himself the voice of his generation
in 2008; declared, “My greatest pain in life is that I will never be
able to see myself perform live” in 2009; declared, “I would never
want a book’s autograph, I am a proud non-reader of books” in 2009;
performed for the authoritarian ruler of Kazakhistan in 2013;
declared, “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as
Jewish people” in 2013; declared himself “the Steve Jobs of the
Internet” in 2013 (wouldn’t the Steve Jobs of the Internet be . . .
Steve Jobs?); described himself, “I am Warhol! I am the number one
most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the
flesh,” in 2013; followed up on his interrupting stunt with Taylor
Swift with an aborted attempt to interrupt Beck in 2015; declared,
“Everyone is a fashion insider, because it’s illegal to be naked” in
2016; contended that Jay-Z was threatening to kill him in 2016;
depicted naked celebrities in a 2016 video; and declared himself “50
per cent more influential than any other human being” in 2016.

I watched Saturday Night Live and they were pretty obsessed
about it. Continuing their Kanye-obsession from the previous week.
The message is pretty clear: Uppity boy, you step off the plantation,
you're asking for trouble.

If a foreign journalist living in America and writing about the Iranian government's noxious policies were murdered by agents of Tehran, the president of the United States would take it as evidence of the need for tough action. Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, however, was a Saudi writing about the Saudi government, which is a U.S. ally.

After Khashoggi disappeared while visiting Riyadh's consulate in Istanbul, Donald Trump was a portrait in timidity. "We want to find out what happened," he bleated more than a week later. "He went in, and it doesn't look like he came out." What happened is pretty clear. Since Khashoggi entered the building October 2, he has not been seen or heard from.

Bleated, Steve? Not howled, creaked, screamed, screeched, wailed, …

Oh well. As far as I can remember, things worked out poorly the last
few times we "got tough" with murderous dictators in that general
area. Maybe things will work out better this time.

As The Federalist’s Sean Davis points
out, according to The New York Times, the average white
person in America has nearly double the amount of American Indian
DNA (0.18%) as Elizabeth Warren (0.098%), who claims to be Cherokee.
[…]

I don’t much care about Warren’s ethnicity, but she is not, in any genuine sense, a racial or ethnic minority. Not in blood. Not in experience. Under her standards, how many Americans would qualify as Native American? Or put it this way: is being 1/1,024th African enough to claim “minority” status in a professional setting? I’m asking for the liberals who believe race-based hiring is an important means of facilitating diversity and ensuring fairness.

I didn't know about the "average white person", and I'm way too old
to see if I'd qualify for racial hiring or admission preferences.
Still, those DNA tests sound interesting.

Two liberal activist groups — Mainers for Accountable Leadership and the Maine People's Alliance — have launched a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is crowdfunding campaign to pressure Collins into voting no on Kavanaugh. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 49,500 people had signed up, agreeing in advance to donate nearly $1.4 million to Collins's as-yet-unidentified 2020 Democratic challenger. Nearly all the pledges are for $25 or less, and the donors' names are publicly posted. Their contributions have been made by credit card, with the stipulation that the charge will be processed only if Collins votes in favor of confirmation.

So far, so normal. What could be more typical of democratic
politics, after all, than lobbying elected officials, or working to
defeat them if you disapprove of their performance in office?

Yet to hear Collins and some of her supporters tell it, mobilizing donors to fund a future challenger isn't citizen activism, it's an illegal bribe. Or maybe it's attempted extortion. But in any case they're sure it's something illegal. They want the Justice Department to investigate the crowdfunding as a violation of Title 18, Section 201 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for anyone to "corruptly" offer "anything of value to any public official" in order "to influence any official act.

I'm glad Kavanaugh was confirmed, and glad Susan Collins voted to
confirm him. But her efforts to quash political spending by her
opponents are blatantly at odds with the Constitution she swore to
support and defend.

The Google LFOD News Alert alerted us to an
unexpected source: an interview with Karen Traister in the Nation
titled
The
Politics of Women’s Anger. What's up, Karen?

[Interviewer] Jon Wiener: The New York Times page-one headline after Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony read, “A Nominee is Rescued By a Display of Rage.” I wonder if you have any comment on that.

Rebecca Traister: One
of the things I write about in the book [Good and Mad: The
Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger] is the issue of whose rage
is taken seriously as politically valid and politically
consequential. Of course, I finished writing this book months before
the Kavanaugh hearings. I wrote about how the kind of political rage
that we take seriously is the rage of powerful white men. Our
founding lullaby is the founders’ rage, the anger that undergirded
the American Revolution: “Give me liberty, or Give me death!”
“Live free or die!”

Yeah, fine, Rebecca. It's exactly the same thing, I'm sure.

But here's something I did not know: a phrase used at the time was
rage militaire, usually translated as "passion for arms". Is
there a useful distinction to be made between "rage" and "passion"?
I think so, but that's inconvenient to Rebecca's thesis.

The millennials’ newest victim, according to Bloomberg News, is American cheese. Processed cheese sales have been down for four years. “The product, made famous by the greatest generation, has met its match with millennials demanding nourishment from ingredients that are both recognizable and pronounceable.”

Those are peculiar criterion. “What’s in this cheese?” “Cyanide, dog hair, chlorine, lark sputum and melted Legos.” “Oh, I know those, and can pronounce them all! I’ll take a pound.”

They can have my Kraft Singles American Pasteurized Prepared Cheese
Product 1GSlices when they…
well, OK they can have them. I'll just buy more.

URLs du Jour

Writing on Twitter, Holthaus declares: “If you are wondering what
you can do about climate change: The world’s top scientists just
gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a
key require to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet. I
mean, if you are looking for something to do.”

That is a nearly perfect specimen of left-wing political writing in 2018: Note the familiar passive-aggressive construction (“If you are wondering . . . I mean, if you are looking for something to do”), the ceremonial invocation of “the world’s top scientists,” the dump-truck approach to meaningless but important-sounding modifiers (“rigorous backing,” “systematically dismantle,” “key requirement”), the assumption that scholarly expertise in one field (climate science) is seamlessly transferable to other fields (macroeconomics), the hectoring hall-monitor tone — I can think of no right-leaning parodist who could do better.

A further Williamsonian observation: "American progressives in particular are a
transparent bunch: Whatever the problem, the answer involves giving
more money and power to people who are aligned politically and
socially with American progressives."

On Wednesday the U.S. Energy Information Agency released its annual
Winter Fuels Outlook. If you heat with propane or natural gas,
you’ll be fine. If you heat with oil, you probably should buy more
blankets. Or an alpaca.

The EIA predicted average price changes this winter of -1 percent for propane, 3 percent for electricity, 5 percent for natural gas and 20 percent for home heating oil.

I hit the themostat for the first time last night, and winced every
time I heard the burner fire up, imagining "there's a dollar…
there's a dollar…"

I'm no Trump fan, goodness knows, but the MSM continue to reveal
themselves as partisan hacks, willing to grab onto the thinnest
out-of-context reeds to do some Trump-trashing. Latest case in
point: Trump's comments in Ohio about Robert E. Lee, on the way to
praising Ohio native U. S. Grant. Powerline (
(Dumbest
Anti-Trump Slur Ever?) and the MinuteMan
(We
March To War) round up the usual suspects: Soledad O'Brien, the
WaPo, the SPLC, and NBC "News".

As a commenter at the latter site points out: they aren't even
trying to tell the truth any more.

The University Near Here has a new President, James "Don't Call Me
Jimmy" Dean. And the Google LFOD News Alert rang for his
Installation
Installation
Remarks! (Yes, they call it an "installation". Like they're
bringing in upgraded software.)

I wonder if you know these slogans? Heart of Dixie…World Famous Potatoes…America’s Dairyland…Greatest Snow on Earth?

Until recently, Live Free or Die was, to me, just another charming license plate slogan. But after only a few months in New Hampshire, I am beginning to appreciate its profound resonance among the state’s citizens.

He continues, excellently, for a while, and I recommend it. For a
while. But then:

But it was in the State of the Union address in 1941, in the foreboding days between the Great Depression and America’s entry into World War II, that President Franklin Roosevelt captured the essence of freedom as many Americans understand it, identifying four essential human freedoms:

Freedom of speech and expression;

Freedom of every person to worship God in his or her own way;

Freedom from want; and

Freedom from fear.

Well, that was a mere year before he signed
Executive
Order 9066. President Dean doesn't mention that complication.

And it gets worse from there. Because, and I am not making this up:
"True freedom depends on education". What follows is mostly trite and
self-serving.

And I rarely put my own tweets here, but I saw this at Powerline's
Week
in Pictures and found it irresistable:

URLs du Jour

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

Gosh. But …

Number one evil corporation on the GHG emitter list? It's "China
(Coal)", accounting for 14.32% of that 71%. That's more than three
times the GHG emissions from number two on the list.

Do you consider China to be a "company"? Neither do I.

And that number two is?
Aramco, a
state-owned enterprise (Saudi Arabia).

And number three:
Gazprom,
majority-owned by … the Russian government.

Finally, down at number five: ExxonMobil, an actual private company.
But further down you see Coal India, Pemex, Petroleos de
Venezuela SA,…

This isn't hard to figure out, but the Guardian actively
misleads its readers by blaming "companies" for GHG emissions.
Unfortunately, it works, as in the case of my lefty friend.
And I might could have responded with our Amazon Product du Jour.

This approach appeals to me. One of my favorite children’s fables is the one about the sun and the wind competing to get a man to take off his coat. The wind blows hard and cold, but that only makes the man pull his coat tighter. The sun bathes the man in warmth, and he removes his coat. I think there is a lesson there for those involved in political conflicts.

But I think that there are complicating factors. Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.

Suppose that there is a spectrum of personal contentment. At one end of that spectrum there are people who are happy with their lives and comfortable in their skins. They feel gratitude. Many of the conservative and libertarian intellectuals that I regularly follow fit in this category. The folks I know at Reason, at National Review, or in the GMU economics department. At the other end of the spectrum are young men who are so frustrated and angry that they become serial killers.

The politics of anger falls somewhere in between. At the extremes, it might be close to the serial-killer end of the spectrum.

I think there's a lot in what Arnold says: to a first handwaving
approximation, lefties tend to be more bitter, angry, and humorless.
(Even their comedy shows are humorless, a sad state of affairs.)

On the other hand, that could well be my cognitive bias speaking. I
await peer-reviewed research.

Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley surprised virtually everybody this
week when she announced she’d be resigning from her post at the end of
the year.

In doing so, Haley has managed something unique. She leaves the Trump administration with her reputation not merely undiminished but actually enhanced. She’s popular with both pro- and anti-Trump factions on the right, and with shockingly high numbers of independents and Democrats. She has a long list of accomplishments under her belt and no embarrassments or scandals. She is almost certainly the most popular politician in America.

She's also one of the few Republicans I'd be more or less happy to
vote for, given the opportunity.

Over the past few months, Donald Trump has staked out an aggressive
opposition to "Medicare-for-all," an increasingly popular liberal
slogan that has multiple meanings but usually refers to some sort of
single-payer health care system.

This is rather rich coming from a candidate who touted single-payer's virtues during the Republican presidential primaries. But Trump's opposition is not merely ironic. It is self-contradicting. The president's primary argument against Medicare-for-all is that it is a socialist scheme that would ruin Medicare, the nation's largest socialist health care program.

As noted in the article, Trump's position is not only ironic, it's
actively harmful to what's needed: overall reform of the
inequitable, unsustainable, US entitlement system.

For the American Left, Sweden is the great exemplar of what progressives erroneously call “socialism” or “democratic socialism,” even though the actual facts of life in Sweden’s open and entrepreneurial economy are far from socialistic. They point to Sweden’s robust economy, enviable standard of living, and the general contentedness of its people and conclude that what the United States needs is higher taxes, more social spending, and a larger public sector. Conservatives cannot help but notice that progressives draw precisely the same lesson from . . . everything: that the wisest course of action is to give more money and power to people and institutions politically aligned with progressives.

For some on the American right, Sweden is a socialist hellhole. The talk-radio ranters and Internet-based rage retailers conclude that Sweden is a socialist hellhole because . . . Sweden must be a socialist hellhole. It has very high taxes, a sprawling welfare state, and public-sector spending that represents an enormous share of GDP. The problem with that analysis is that Swedes don’t seem to believe that they live in a socialist hellhole, and Sweden sure as heck doesn’t look like one. It has its troubles, including worrisome unrest within its poorly assimilated immigrant community, but in the main it is a prosperous, healthy, and happy country.

Kevin's article is kind of a plug for Johan Norberg's
new documentary,
Sweden: Lessons for
America?. If you're a podcast person, there's
a Reason interview
here,

And
Steve Horwitz
had a
Cafe Hayek
quote of the day, and I thought it was good enough to say "me too":

First Man

Bottom line: I expected to like this better.

It is, as you have probably heard, a look at the life of Neil Armstrong,
first man to set foot on the lunar surface. It covers, roughly, 8 years
(1961-1969) out of his 82-year life (1930-2012). But they were probably
the most eventful. It is based on a biography by James R. Hansen (who is
a history prof at Auburn, not the same guy as NASA's global warming
doomsayer).

Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong as a shut-down, closed-off introvert, only
emotionally moved by the 1962 death of his two-year-old daughter from
the complications arising from her cancer treatment. Other than that
heartbreak, the movie concentrates on Armstrong's and NASA's fumbles and
bumbles along the way: a dramatic X-15 flight; the near-fatal Gemini 8; the loss of astronauts
See and Bassett in a jet crash; the Apollo 1 fire; the crash of one of
the lunar lander trainers where Armstrong had to eject.

In addition, a number of Apollo-naysayers are featured: Kurt Vonnegut
bemoaning that the Apollo money could be spent on making New York City
liveable; Gil Scot-Heron performing his protest piece
"Whitey
on the Moon". Sigh.

I've seen the major spaceflight movies; this one is notable for
portraying (accurately, as far as I know) the noise and vibration
involved in strapping yourself to rockets. Somewhat impressive.

The movie looks so hard at the bad and dangerous stuff, the triumphs are
glossed over. The actual moon landing is anticlimactic. Buzz Aldrin
comes across as kind of a jerk. Armstrong's
wife, Janet, has a major role, mainly being worried about Neil not
coming back. A major scene shows a quarrel about whether/how Armstrong
should speak to his kids before setting off for the moon.

URLs du Jour

2018-10-12

I'm sure we'll have a Kavanaugh-free day Real Soon Now, but… not
today, friends. At NR, Kevin D. Williamson takes a hard look
at what happens
After Kavanaugh.

One can almost admire the brazen, cynical genius behind the Democrats’ smear campaign against Judge Kavanaugh, which is only the logical extension of the similar campaigns they conducted against Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas — and, for that matter, George W. Bush, about whom the Democrats said more or less exactly what they say today about Donald Trump, i.e., that he represented a unique threat to American democracy, a clear and present danger to the republic not seen since . . . the last time there was a Republican president. The Democrats lost this one, and they do care about winning, but this kind of mau-mauing is not only about winning in the particular matter at hand: It is about fear. Even if you don’t win this round, you can encourage would-be participants to sit out future contests — especially if they have families.

The Democrats’ strategy can be summarized: “Sure, you may win an election. And, sure, you may be an accomplished jurist with a sterling record. But if you come between us and what we want — and what we want is the power to dominate you — then we will slander you as a rapist, and our media friends will see to it that this slander, no matter how obviously false, is the first thing people think about when they think about you, for the rest of your life. You may beat us in an election, but we’ll take it out on your children, and we have the New York Times and the Yale Law School. Enjoy your victory.”

I have to admit that I view politics like a lot of people view
sports, an interesting source of entertainment. There are
differences though. Example: sports fans love
watching actual games. The closest analog in politics is (I suppose)
candidate debates, which I can't stand to watch.

And, if I have to root for anyone, I have to root for the hapless, hopeless,
half-crazy, Libertarians. Might as well be a Cleveland Browns fan.

I can't bring myself to cheer for Republicans, who talk about their
small-government ideals, but never manage to implement them.
(Closest NFL analogs: Bills and Vikings)

But Democrats have given me more than enough reasons, seemingly
daily, to cheer against them. I feel about them the same way most
non-New
Englanders feel about the Patriots. (There's an impressive array
of anti-Patriot product at Amazon, but we'll go with something a
little more pro for our Product du Jour.)

Clinton's idea of civility—the grace that good people with power deign to grant their defeated and benighted opponents—reminds me of Nira Cain-N'Degeocello, the smug Sacha Baron Cohen character who sees his mission as "listening respectfully, without prejudice, to Republicans, with the hope of changing their racist and childish views." But when she says "you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for," she demonstrates an even more disturbing failure of empathy, since she denies the possibility that people may sincerely disagree with her for what they take to be good reasons and may therefore think she is trying to destroy what they stand for. If civility is out of the question in that situation, peaceful and rational debate is impossible.

Only quibble with the above: see Kevin D. Williamson arguing
against
empathy.

We've gotten the habit of live-watching the 5pm local news on
Manchester's WMUR, which—aieee!—unfortunately means political ads.
The Democrat's gubernatorial candidate is Molly Kelly, and her ads
savage incumbent Chris Sununu for daring to oppose "paid family and
medical leave", a feelgood issue that apparently focus-groups well
among those who don't want to be bothered with the details.
Unfortunately for Molly, at
Inside Sources, Michael Graham looks at the details:
Molly
Kelly’s “Unsustainable” Attack on the Paid Family Medical Leave
Issue. The problem being that the legislation Sununu opposed was
"opt-out", which would make the whole thing insolvent.

(Which, of course, is the idea: eventually, down the road, you have to make it
mandatory.)

Conclusion:

As it stands, Molly Kelly is attacking Gov. Sununu for not supporting a paid family leave plan that even the researchers who worked with its advocates concede is unsustainable. The failure is built in.

The obvious solution would be for Kelly to offer her own plan. But that would involve admitting that Sununu made the right decision by killing the plan backed by House Democrats. It appears that Molly Kelly would rather have the political issue than a sustainable solution.

November 6, Election Day 2018, can be the day we start taking our country back. We have allowed our community, county delegation, state Legislature, governor’s office, Congress, the presidency and now the Supreme Court to be hijacked by people who don’t care about the plight of working families, don’t care if people have affordable health care, don’t care about sexual assault, don’t care about women’s reproductive rights, don’t care that guns are making our communities dangerous, don’t care that fossil fuels are poisoning our air and destroying our ability to live on this planet, don’t care about public education, don’t care about Social Security, don’t care about discrimination and injustice, and don’t care about the spreading of hate, intolerance and lies.

The people we have allowed into places of power, the people who
don’t care, are members of the so-called Tea Party, the Free-State
Project, and now unfortunately many people who were once just
mainstream Republicans. These people masquerade using themes of
frugalness, school choice, right to life, right to work, right to
bear arms, and now putting America first. We have allowed these
ploys to deeply divide our neighborhoods and country. They have
succeeded in placing two legislative constitutional amendment
questions on the N.H. ballot — in the guise of live free or
die and taxes are unfair — that if approved will further dismantle the support systems we depend on as a society.

I can't help but admire the lack of self-reflection necessary to
(1) paint vast swaths of your fellow citizens as poisoners who
want to see the survivors of such poisoning get sick, impoverished,
raped, shot, stupid, and (even) discriminated against; (2) blame
them for also "spreading hate, intolerance, and lies".
Rick's solution: elect Democrats to save us from certain doom and
also hurt feelings. Fine.

But just a side note on the two proposed
constitutional
amendments: the first, "Accountability of Magistrates and
Officers; Public’s Right to Know" was "Passed by the N.H. House 309
Yes 9 No; Passed by State Senate 22 Yes 2 No"; the second, "Right to
Privacy" was less lopsided: "Passed by the N.H. House 235 Yes 96
No; Passed by State Senate 15 Yes 9 No", the nine nays all
Democrats.

URLs du Jour

Confirming Brett Kavanaugh was the best outcome at the end of a hellish decision tree that left the country with no ideal option.

Reasonable people may differ on that. But what seems more obvious: It’s
all going to get worse. Because everyone is taking the wrong lessons
from the Kavanaugh debacle.

Well, not everyone, obviously. Not me. Or Jonah. But…

Let’s start with the president. In an interview Saturday night on
Fox News Channel’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” President Trump
said that he was the one who “evened the playing field” for
Kavanaugh when he mocked Christine Blasey Ford at a Mississippi
rally the previous week.

“Well, there were a lot of things happening that weren’t correct,
they weren’t true, and there were a lot of things that were left
unsaid,” Trump told host Jeanine Pirro. “It was very unfair to the
judge. . . . So I evened the playing field. Once I did that, it
started to sail through.”

As Jonah points out, Trump's description at odds with
reality. (And Trump has equally delusional counterparts on the other
side.)

To win an election is not sufficient — it is much more satisfying to be revealed as one of the chosen by capital-H History, which progressives always are declaring themselves to be on the right side of. (One of the funny consequences of that is that important progressives such as President Wilson and Senator Russell are read out of the progressives’ historical account of their own movement because of the horrible racial views they held.) To win a political victory is one thing — a relatively petty thing — but to have one’s political will and sense of personal identity revealed as a constituent of the foundational bedrock of the nation, blessed by History itself, is a different kind of thing altogether. And that is what the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court threatened to take away from the Left, which is why their campaign against him was conducted with such hysteria. Some conservatives noted that it resembled religious fervor, but it did not resemble that: It was not something like religious fervor but actual religious fervor, the thing itself.

Which is to say, the Left will not take up originalism because the political process can give progressives only some of what they want. Democracy may provide the policy outcomes they desire, but progressives desire much more than that. They desire domination for its own sake, as a source of pleasure, and that domination grows more desirable the more closely the instrument of domination resembles a religious body: e.g., wise men in black robes interpreting an occult text inscrutable to the uninitiated, who, being profane and outside the clerisy, cannot read between its lines. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.

Amen. (Yes, I had to look it up, good for you if you don't.)

Ah, the Google LFOD News Alert rang for a couple items in my local
paper, Foster's Daily Democrat. First up is an LTE from
self-described octogenarian Peter J. Eldredge of Somersworth:
Choice
— It’s the ’603 way’.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) not long ago decided to remove the option for people with disabilities to freely select to receive their case management (CM) from the same agency that they receive all their other services from. They believe there would be a “conflict of interest” under the present system that has been successfully operating for 40 years or so.

Peter perceives this as negatively impacting the care of his
long-term disabled daughter.

On the other hand, the rationale behind the new (Obama-era,
actually) rule is easy to
understand: should the same organization that consumes
Medicare/Medicaid cash for services be the same organization that
determines what services the patient needs? Um… given the reported
levels
of Medicaid fraud saying no doesn't sound unreasonable.

Anyway, where's the LFOD? Ah, here it is:

New Hampshire is noted for allowing choice in not only these
circumstances but in most of everything we undertake. We are the
“live free or die” state. What is happening to “freedom of choice”?
What is happening to “give me liberty or give me death”? I don’t
believe we should allow the federal government to trample all over
our hard-earned liberties and rights. Thank you Governor Sununu for
taking a firm stand in favor of maintaining NH’s right to make our
own decisions that affect NH’s citizens. After all, it’s the “603
way”

Geez, give me a fiscal break here, Peter. This is like those Tea
Partiers who (allegedly) demanded that their representatives
"Keep your government hands
off my Medicare". You take their money, you play by their rules.

All people are born with inalienable rights — the right to practice
one’s chosen religion, to exercise free speech, etc. These rights
define our personhood and cannot be transferred from person to
person; they are inherent. They are also the core of our country’s
founding principles and the riveting power behind the phrase “We the
People”: each person is created equal and deserves the same human
and legal rights.

But then it all falls apart:

However, courts have dictated that corporations have the same ‘personhood.’ Their rulings have applied the rights of a single human to the conglomerate of individuals who make up a corporation. In other words, by virtue of individuals in a corporation having inalienable rights, the corporation has these same rights, even though, by definition, inalienable rights aren’t transferable.

These claimed corporate ‘rights’ were first recognized in 1886′s State of California vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court decision. Despite dissenting opinions, presiding Justice Waite stated that corporations “are guaranteed the property right written in the 14th Amendment.” Over the next 30 years, the 14th amendment was used less than 20 times to defend the rights of freed slaves and over 200 times to defend the property rights of corporations.

Put another way, we don’t live free or die because despite our New Hampshire Bill of Rights declaring the unconstitutionality of it, the reality of New Hampshire residents is that corporations now have equal and even more standing than we do: 1) state preemption disallows citizens from elevating their rights above those of corporate claimed rights; 2) if citizens sue a corporation for harms its project has exacted on their community, the corporation’s project permit is recognized as an individual’s legal property, and corporate ‘personhood’ is allowed to undermine our attempt to collectively exercise individual rights in the municipalities where we live.

Note the oxymoronic phraseology of "our attempt to
collectively exercise individual rights". The bottom-line deal is
(as near as I can tell) to strengthen the hand of local politicians
to hassle and obstruct companies.

The first week of September saw the heads of tech companies hauled to Capitol Hill yet again to explain themselves to a bunch of grumpy senators. Whenever this happens, the hearing inevitably begins with hours of bloviation about "the public interest" before someone raises the idea that social media sites should be treated "like public utilities." Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa) is a big fan of this line of questioning, raising it in the previous go-round with Google in July: "What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we're talking about here into public utilities?"

The notion that Twitter or Google are as vital to American citizens as water and electricity—and therefore must be subject to a much higher level of government scrutiny and regulation, or perhaps even government ownership—is misbegotten on several fronts. But at the root of the whole debate is a conflation of different definitions of the word public. Sometimes it means "of the state," as in public sector or public school; other times it means "for general use or benefit," as in public square, public accommodation, or the public good. But often it describes something that is clearly private property but just so happens to have members of the general public as shareholders, as in publicly held or publicly traded.

I'm sure the Town of Rollinsford NH is eagerly awaiting its chance
to sue Google/Twitter/Facebook for some hoked-up charge for "harms"
exacted on our community. We might shake a few million out of them.

URLs du Jour

A recent example of the
Suicide of the West as revealed in a quick-developing Twitstorm:

Ex-astronaut Scott Kelly makes a point by quoting Winston
Churchill;

Numerous lefties freak out at him about Churchill's numerous
failures to abide by 21st-century Progressive norms;

Kelly says mea culpa (although, since the Romans kept
slaves, who knows how long that phrase will remain
unproblematic):

Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My
apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities,
racist views which I do not support. My point was we need to come
together as one nation. We are all Americans. That should transcend
partisan politics.

But, of course, we cannot come together as one nation so long as we
engage in the foolish exercise of savaging our civilizational
history. Good-faith conversations about American history recognize
the multifaceted moral nature of human existence: the fact that
George Washington was a slaveholder does not render his status as
father of the country moot; the fact that Abraham Lincoln spent most
of his career advocating for colonization of black Americans in
Africa rather than their full integration into American life does
not obliterate Lincoln’s role as the Great Emancipator. Human beings
are products of their time — and they are capable of holding
viewpoints that resonate down through the ages and the prejudices of
their own age. Undoubtedly, a century from now, few will look kindly
at even the most broadminded Americans’ views on a variety of
issues.

I'd double down on that last thought: a century from now, people
will especially be aghast at the views of "the most broadminded
Americans" of today.

Yesterday during a discussion of midterm voters’ motivation levels, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin cut off commentator Matt Lewis when he said, “I believe it’s the overreaction of the left. When you see people like Ted Cruz getting chased out of restaurants by a mob, when you see — ”

“Oh, you’re not going to use the mob word here,” Baldwin interjected.

Are too, replied Matt and Mary Katherine. Good for them.

Baldwin also deployed another dishonesty:

“Let me move past the m-word, because I do feel like that’s part of the weaponization of what’s happening now, on the right,” Baldwin said, then pivoted to another topic.

Accurate language is considered to be "weaponization" when wielded
by people you don't like.

The day after Eddie Edwards won the NH-01 GOP primary, people began writing him off. The Cook Political Report moved his race against Democrat Chris Pappas from “Leans Democrat” to “Likely Democrat.” An ARG poll gave Pappas a 55-33 point advantage over Edwards. The conventional wisdom has been that Edwards might be able to run a good enough campaign to beat Pappas, and maybe he could run one good enough to ‘beat’ Trump (the president’s low poll numbers). But there’s no way he can beat both.

But now Edwards’ prospects are getting a second look–thanks to Justice Kavanaugh and the ‘Brett Bump.’

Pappas's ads have started appearing on the local news, and they are
standard focus-grouped moral-posturing pablum, full of meaning-free phrases: "an
economy that works for everyone", "Congress is tilted in favor of
the special interests and big corporations", "universal healthcare"
(even for Klingons?), etc. If that works, so much the worse for us.
(Pappas issue page
here.)

The GOP candidate, Eddie Edwards, has his issue page
here. I find it
better, but… I'll probably vote for the
Libertarian Party candidate,
Dan Belforti.

URLs du Jour

After the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Justice Brett M.
Kavanaugh, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted
that she was “not going to sugarcoat anything. We lost a tough
fight. And it hurts. What happened today will touch every single
person in this country, in some very real & terrible ways. But
it’s OK to step back for a minute, take a breath, & lean on the
shoulder of someone you love.”

Oh, please. For those who were awaiting the permission of a U.S. senator to lean on a shoulder, you are authorized to proceed. For the rest of us, yes, let’s take a breath. If a Supreme Court justice whose nominal job is to apply laws to specific cases is touching “every single person in this country, in some very real & terrible ways,” then we have bigger constitutional problems.

As I type,
Election Betting Odds
has Senator Warren with an 8.0% probability of being our next
US president. Which is way too high for comfort.
If she thinks her duty as a mere senator is to
direct the shoulder-leanings of the American citizenry, what will
she think the Presidency will allow her to do?

When modern Democrats talk about prese[r]ving “norms,” traditions,” or even the “Constitution,” they’re really talking about preserving their preferred policies. We know this because “liberals” have shown themselves not only willing to destroy the legitimacy of institutions like the presidency, the Senate ,and Supreme Court to protect those policies, they’re willing to break down basic norms of civility, as well.

Take the example of Hillary Clinton. In the very first sentence in her new scaremongering essay, which makes the case that America’s “democratic institutions and traditions are under siege,” she attacks our democratic institutions and traditions. “It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States,” the piece begins.

The intimation, of course, widely shared by the mainstream left, is that Trump isn’t a legitimate president even though he won the election in the exact same way every other president in U.S. history has ever won election. According to our long-held democratic institutions and traditions, you become president through the Electoral College, not the non-existent popular vote.

Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine) expressed frustration with Planned
Parenthood on Sunday, accusing the group of a double standard when
it comes to Supreme Court nominees.

“I would note that Planned Parenthood opposed three pro-choice
justices just because they were nominated by Republican presidents:
David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Kennedy,” Collins
said, recalling the organization’s opposition to Justice Anthony
Kennedy.

“They said the same thing: Women will die. This is just outrageous.”

Senator Susan Collins, inexplicably, said she was still in favor of
sending tax dollars to Planned Parenthood.

Last week The New York Times released a major investigative report into President Donald Trump's personal finances. The story, which took over a year to produce and relied on a massive trove of confidential documents, describes the accumulation of the Trump family's real estate fortune and the mechanisms that Trump's father, Fred C. Trump, used to pass wealth on to his children, with Trump receiving an outsized share. The story is relevant because the president's refusal to release his tax returns has left the public with few detailed glimpses into his financial dealings.

The report makes a strong case that Trump's public claims to being wealthy as a result of his business acumen ("I built what I built myself") are a myth created by Trump and abetted by allies in the media.

The details may be newly-revealed, but the general idea shouldn't
be shocking news. Back in
June
2015, we quoted Kevin D. Williamson's description of Trump as
"the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio
of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire
slumlord father".

“We’re number two” just doesn’t sound right, does it? New
Hampshire placed second in the latest version of [the Cato
Institute] study, Freedom
in the 50 States, and we’ve gotten some flak for it. So why is the
Live Free or Die state not number one?

Jason and Will break down the good news and bad for NH liberty
found in
Freedom in the 50
States. (Which, yes I know, I've linked to before.)

In the Woods

Although I'm not much in the market for adopting new authors into
my
TBR
system, sometimes it just happens. The weekly "editorial roundtable"
episodes of the
Reason podcast have a
segment where the participants reveal which media they've been reading,
watching, or playing with recently. And Peter Suderman was effusive in
his praise of the "Dublin Murder Squad" series by Tana French.
(And, by the way, Peter is not alone: this book
won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and much mainstream critical
praise was heaped thereon.)

Even better: This first book in the series was available at the UNH Library, so I
decided to take a flyer.

The narrator is Rob Ryan; he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are called
to investigate the horrid, sordid murder of a twelve-year-old girl found
in the woods of a Dublin suburb. The girl's family is weird. The murder
scene is about to be obliterated by a new highway, and archeologists are
frantically digging up whatever they artifacts they can find from
long-ago inhabitants; the archeologists are weird too. And there's some
shady stuff going on with corrupt city officials and crony developers.

But what's really bad is Rob's history: twenty years ago, he and
two friends were playing in those very same woods. His friends vanished
without a trace; Rob was found, near-catatonic and bloody, unable to
remember what happened to them. Could the present day murder have links
to that past horror? Yeah, maybe!
Rob is already keeping his traumatic past a well-hidden secret from
nearly everyone, but
(even so) it's a poor choice for him to get enmeshed in the present
crime. Unfortunately for Rob, it's just the first of many poor choices.

This is a combination police procedural and psychological thriller, and
both parts work well.
So, yeah, I'm up for reading more Tana French.

URLs du Jour

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual misconduct ranging from flashing to attempted rape. Some of the accusations were the subject of widely televised testimony in the Senate last week. Conventional wisdom now holds that it was Kavanaugh's personal performance during this testimony—not the believable but unprovable allegations of his first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford—that tanked the judge's credibility among the persuadable.

Those who have been swayed against Kavanaugh cite his vague and sometimes implausible answers about his high school and college life outside of the alleged assaults. They argue—in tweets, essays, explainers—that his shiftiness should serve as a mark against him, even if it's not necessarily evidence that he's guilty of sexual violence. That he may not have lied outright, but his evasive and emotional performance was still potentially disqualifying.

Whatever more serious things Kavanaugh may or may not be guilty of, his antics inspired suspicion that the perfectionist public persona was but an exquisitely constructed mask. Kavanaugh's credibility crisis isn't about belief (or lack thereof) in any particular set of facts but a perceived absence of authenticity in the nominee overall.

The perception of phoniness (aka "absence of authenticity") in
political candidates has long been a Pun Salad specialty.
Elizabeth's essay takes this issue seriously, and, in a daring
narrative twist, makes the case
for forgiveness.

A thing that has been not entirely appreciated about the Kavanaugh
affair: This was the Left’s version of Pizzagate. And the Democrats’
Pizzagate wasn’t carried out by fringe nutters on obscure conspiracy
sites: It was carried out by Senate Democrats and leading
progressive activists on well-known conspiracy sites such as the
New York Times opinion section.

A fair number of putatively respectable thought-leaders and opinion-makers extended the cover of their reputations over a series of increasingly bizarre and unlikely allegations for which there was essentially no evidence. (Why was there no evidence? The most likely explanation is that the claims were not true; but, of course, conspiracy theorists always take a lack of evidence as evidence of the conspiracy. “That’s just what you’d expect to see!” etc.) Of course, there will be no reckoning for this, because there never is. That’s the nice thing about having your political and cultural allies in charge of institutions such as the New York Times and the Yale Law School.

Also: the supplemental FBI investigation was obviously
slipshod and incomplete, because it didn't produce the Left-desired
results. QED.

(If you're one of the folks who don't get the Pizzagate reference,
the Wikipedia entry is
here.)

American political discourse gets worse by the day, a lesson we’ve seen first-hand again this weekend. The
Twitter
mob on the political left is claiming that our Saturday editorial headline, “Susan Collins Consents,” was intended as a sly “rape joke.”

Of course, the Lefties (probably) knew about the Constitution's
"advice and consent" language. That didn't stop them from writing
that the WSJ headline "seems like a rape joke" or a "play on
words… with rape".

With no evidence whatsoever.

You just want to ask these people… seriously… don't you realize how
much of this crap is coming out of your own brain?

President Donald Trump signed into law the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 – a law which regulates everything from airline seat sizes to whether people can make cell phone calls on flights (something Jazz wrote in favor of earlier today). The bill also defined exactly what a Lactation Area is (they can’t be in restrooms) and includes money for studies looking at the design specifics of aircraft oxygen and on allergic reactions on board airlines. There’s also a study on what infrastructure is needed for faster-growing airports because we all know the airports and airlines don’t have enough money to pay for the upgrades (note sarcasm). Let’s also not forget the studies on noise abatement and funding to put these abatements into place. Again, because there’s no way the airlines and airports can pony up the cash (again, sarcasm).

The entire cost of this behemoth bill? A whopping $22.5B in FY 2018 to almost $76B in FY2023. The debt, just in case anyone cares about it, has gone from $14.434T in January 2017 to $15.757T on October 6, 2018.

It was the usual Congressional shenanigans: a 1200-page doorstop of
a bill, dropped into public view four days before the scheduled
vote.

Some people don't like Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This won't
come as surprise to many of you: the film currently has a "Rotten"
audience score on RottenTomatoes despite good critical reaction,
indicating that at least 100,000 people went to site specifically to
complain about a Star Wars movie. The Free Beacon‘s
in-house critic didn't
like the movie. But evidently, the loud and public backlash to
the movie was actually a Russian plot!

The Hollywood Reporter has a shocking piece out today: "‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds." The findings spread quickly after being picked up by the Drudge Report: "A Study Says About Half Of ‘The Last Jedi’ Haters Online Were Actually Russian Trolls," reports UpRoxx, Comic Book Resources writes that "Russian Bots May Have Derailed The Last Jedi," Business Insider writes that "A lot of the criticism of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi' actually came from Russian trolls and bots."

We previously mentioned this gripping issue
here;
at the time, I found the "Russian troll" evidence the paper
presented to be "very circumstantial and not particularly convincing."
Alex's detailed dissection seems to back up that cursory impression.

Our Amazon Product du Jour offers a Sad Porg, dismayed that he got
stuck into a movie series where nobody likes the cute alien
creatures. ("Why couldn't I be a tribble? Everybody loves tribbles!")

URLs du Jour

Waiting on a taxi at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, I ran into a robot cop.

Perhaps you’ve seen these latest innovations in law enforcement. The NYPD robot looks like the offspring of a union between R2-D2 and one of those covered trash cans you see in national parks, and it makes an incessant and annoying whirring sound that has nothing to do with the operation of the machine — it is a generated sound effect that some consultant, no doubt highly paid, believed to be high-tech sounding. The robot does a few things: It gets in your way, it provides as prop for tourists to take pictures with, and it contributes to the panopticon of surveillance that now encompasses our public spaces, taking audio and video.

It is marginally less useful than the average American “public servant,” which is a kind of remarkable negative achievement.

Marvelous essay,

An article in the latest print Reason has made it out into
public consumption, worth a read if you're interested in K-12
education, or you (like me) just like to see where your state ranks compared
to others. But beware, say the authors, Stan Liebowitz & Matthew
L. Kelly, because
Everything You Know About State Education Rankings Is Wrong.

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst
education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings
such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you
likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are
thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It's an understandable
conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous "Best Schools!" lists. It's
also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Click through for the authors' criticism of traditional rankings,
and why they prefer their own.

Spoiler: New Hampshire does pretty well in traditional
rankings. For example, number 2 behind Massachusetts at US
News. At Reason, the news is … not so rosy.

The descent of American capitalism into a racket is being greased by professed capitalists in government, in collaboration with professed capitalists in what is called, with decreasing accuracy, the private sector. This is occurring under the auspices of Republicans, and while many Democrats are arguing, with some accuracy but more incoherence, this: The government has become a servant of grasping private interests — and should be much bigger and more interventionist.

Protectionism — laws and administrative rulings by which government determines the prices and quantities of imported goods and services — is government regulation. So, it is probable that the current administration, which lists deregulation as among its glistening achievements, is producing a substantial net increase in economic regulation.

Read the whole thing for some depressing/enraging news about the Dixon
Ticonderoga pencil company, which I always considered to be the
unnamed hero of the
classic
I,
Pencil
story. Now…

URLs du Jour

2018-10-06

Gosh, we will really, probably, start winding down these
Kavanaugh-related links someday. But Jonah Goldberg's G-File this
week talks about
The
Price of Victory. And that's probably important enough for your
attention.

One of the articles of faith of my personal definition of conservatism is to be deeply distrustful of enthusiasm. Chalk it up to misanthropy or enochlophobia if you like, but whenever crowds — real or figurative — get worked up, I grow suspicious. It’s why I don’t like populism or pep rallies; the worst political sins are almost always accompanied by the cheers of one mob or another.

That is one of the reasons I have been so appalled by the riot of anti-Kavanaugh hysteria that has spread these last few weeks. But it is also why I have misgivings about the price of victory.

I believe that confirming Brett Kavanaugh is vital, but I also believe it is the least bad option before us. Herewith, a screed-y walkthrough of my thinking.

Summary: we're about to enter a new phase of the cultural war. Can I
be a conscientious objector?

Oh, and "enochlophobia"? Look it up, if necessary. (I had to.) And
our Amazon Product du Jour may help, and it's only $0.89.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Starting with Justice O’Connor and continuing with Justice Kennedy, there has been a person who, er, found the center, who people couldn’t predict in that sort of way. … It’s not so clear that, you know, I think going forward, that sort of middle position — you know, it’s not so clear whether we’ll have it.

Ed comments:

And on that note, it’s rather revealing in this clip that Kagan never considers herself for the role of the unpredictable jurist — or Sonia Sotomayor, who’s sitting next to her and never bothers to interject either. Kagan’s argument is that it should always be conservative jurists who go towards Kagan’s wing of the court, and not the other direction. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn’t Kagan take her own advice?

It’s also amusing that Kagan almost explicitly assigns herself and the other three liberal justices to the roles of predictable jurist in this statement. It’s undeniably true, but one would expect a Supreme Court justice to at least argue that she’s independent. Give Kagan one cheer for honesty, I guess, and a half-cheer to Sotomayor for not objecting to it.

It's easy to observe that Sotomayor/Kagan/Breyer/Ginsburg
rarely, if ever, show the independence of mind necessary to stray off the Predictable Progressive Reservation.
It's interesting when one of them essentially admits that, yeah,
that's never gonna happen.

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

The assertion is that this is an operation masterminded via a unit of
China's People’s Liberation Army. All sources anonymous, but you
would kind of expect that…

Naturally, people are skeptical of this “spy chip” story. On one
side you have Bloomberg’s decades-long stellar reputation and
reporting acumen, a thoroughly researched story citing more than a
dozen sources — some inside the government and out — and presenting
enough evidence to present a convincing case.

On the other, the sources are anonymous — likely because the information they shared wasn’t theirs to share or it was classified, putting sources in risk of legal jeopardy. But that makes accountability difficult. No reporter wants to say “a source familiar with the matter” because it weakens the story. It’s the reason reporters will tag names to spokespeople or officials so that it holds the powers accountable for their words. And, the denials from the companies themselves — though transparently published in full by Bloomberg — are not bulletproof in outright rejection of the story’s claims. These statements go through legal counsel and are subject to government regulation. These statements become a counterbalance — turning the story from an evidence-based report into a “he said, she said” situation.

So there's plenty of room for skepticism. There's also plenty of
room to get out the wirecutters and snip your connection to the
Internet.

Reached by BuzzFeed News, multiple Apple sources — three of them
very senior executives who work on the security and legal teams —
said that they are at a loss as to how to explain the allegations.
These people described a massive, granular, and siloed investigation
into not just the claims made in the story, but into unrelated
incidents that might have inspired them.

“We tried to figure out if there was anything, anything, that transpired that’s even remotely close to this,” a senior Apple security executive told BuzzFeed News. “We found nothing.”

Of course, the voices that somehow manage to penetrate through the
multiple layers of tinfoil around my head are saying: Yeah,
that's just what you would expect them to say.

And finally, we haven't had a Ramireztoon lately. Here's one
(unfortunately clipped, click on through for the big beautiful
entire thing)
on Trump's Trade War:
Apocalypse Now.

Back in the day, Vermont Senator George Aiken commented about
Vietnam: "Declare victory and go home." I wasn't a fan of
surrendering in the face of Communist aggression, but …

Cover Girl

This 1944 musical comedy stars Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth. (We got on
kind of a Rita Hayworth kick after watching Gilda.) It invites
comparison with Singin' in the Rain. And that comparison is:
"It's nowhere near as good as Singin' in the Rain." But let me
explain:

Mr. Kelly plays Danny, proprietor of a semi-seedy Brooklyn
nightspot, featuring vaudeville-style skits and production numbers. Ms.
Hayworth is Rusty, one of the chorus girls, and also Danny's sweetheart. Phil
Silvers is also in the mix as "Genius", a comic who might have seemed
funny in the 1940s.

So Rusty (and the rest of the chorus) notice a ad for a Vanity
magazine cover girl. After a series of merry mixups, and the
coincidental fling of the magazine's owner with Rusty's grandmother back
in the day, she lands the job.
And (since she looks just like frickin' Rita Hayworth) she finds herself
on the path to glamorous stardom. And wooed by a rich playboy.

Leaving Danny behind? Don't worry, this is a comedy, not A Star is
Born.

The script is straight out of Cliché Central. The songs are forgettable.
Acting is OK.

But Gene Kelly saves the day when he starts dancing. As usual. And (just
like Singin' in the Rain) he makes his dance partners look good
too. No spoilers, but there's a number where cinematic trickery is used
to give him a very unexpected partner; I'm surprised the technology of
1944 was up to that.

URLs du Jour

2018-10-05

Continuing on a theme we've been hitting a lot in recent days, Kevin
D. Williamson wonders if we're on
The
Road to Waco. Recalling Janet Reno, her railroading of daycare
workers accused of Satanic abuse cultism, as well her responsibility
for the Branch Davidian
standoff with
76 deaths.

Our public-policy discourse is dominated by members of our elites and hence tends to reflect elite interests and, at times, elite hysterias. A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the epidemic of rape on our nation’s college campuses. That epidemic is a fiction — it simply does not exist, and the data suggest that women in college are less likely than women in the general population to be raped. We are not having a national discussion of rape on Indian reservations, in remote communities in Alaska, or in poor urban areas — i.e., in the places where the incidence of rape is in fact elevated. During the Satan-ritual-abuse panic — and at this minute — one of the most likely places for a child to experience sexual abuse is in the home, especially in “blended” families in which minors cohabit with adult men to whom they are not biologically related. Mothers’ live-in boyfriends and stepfathers commit a great deal more sexual abuse than do the nefarious minions of Satan in underground cults.

But of course the reality — that this world is the mess we make of it — is too painful to accept.

KDW hopes, as do I, that the current wackiness passes before we get
a Waco equivalent.

Our related Amazon Product du Jour is the album "Abattoir of Slain Deities"
by the UK band "Omnipotent Hysteria". Its official genre, which
I
am not making up,
is "Brutal Death Metal". I assume their music would unlistenable to
my tender, aging ears, but their song titles are absolutely
brilliant. ("Ectopic Contagion Vessels" anyone? How about "Forged in the
Embers of Monolithic Devastation"?)

The University of Southern Maine’s president defended the
institution Wednesday night, saying a retired professor acted in a
“rogue manner” when she offered students a “pop-up” course and
college credit to take a bus to Washington, D.C., with demonstrators
planning to urge Sen. Susan Collins to oppose confirming Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

President Glenn Cummings in a telephone interview denounced the actions of Dr. Susan Feiner, a former professor of economics and women and gender studies, who Cummings said retired from the university on July 1.

Prof Feiner is quoted: "There is nothing seditious about students
taking a bus to Washington, D.C., in a historic moment." Managing to
deny a charge that nobody was actually making. Do I see elective
office in her future?

At EconLog, Bryan Caplan writes on the academic kerfuffle
that we've been blogging about the last couple days
(here,
here),
the fake "grievance studies" paper-writing scam, which some call…
Sokal
2.0 as Ideological Turing Test. What's that? Bryan explains:

Mill states it well: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct. And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct. (See free trade). It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom.

Bryan goes on to observe:

My idea has inspired multiple
actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same
league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic
genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s
content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles
[to] earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.

But what does that show? Bryan explains, evenhandedly, as is
his wont. (I have little doubt myself, but I'm not as good as
Bryan.)

When the first official stop sign did appear in Detroit, in 1915, it was small, white, and square, nothing like the red octagon we know today. But in 1923, a branch of Mississippi’s highway department suggested a change—what if a sign’s shape could denote the kind of hazard ahead? The logic was simple: The more sides a sign has, the more dangerous the upcoming stretch of road is.

Circles (which were considered to have infinite sides) designated the riskiest hazards, like railroad crossings. Octagons denoted the second most perilous hazards, like intersections. Diamonds signaled less-tricky stretches, and rectangles were strictly informational. We still use these parameters today, though no one knows why the nonagon drew the short stick.

I like that circles were "considered to have infinite sides".
Somebody was paying attention in calculus class.

And finally, our Google LFOD alert rang for another unlikely source,
a LTE in the Suburban, "Quebec's Largest English Weekly
Newspaper". (Kind of like: "Tallest Building in Wichita", but
anyway). It's from Area Man Brian Echenberg, and he says:
No to compulsory voting. Enough laws already!.

I was intrigued by Mario leclerc’s letter about forcing people to
vote. Aren’t we saddled with enough laws, good and bad, to warrant
the absence of yet another law? Everything from not smoking in
public in Hampstead to laws such as motorcycle helmets to not being
able to ride a motorcycle or scooter after Dec 15th to even
mandatory winter tires in winter. Many of these laws may be somewhat
helpful, but we are being told what we can and can’t do more and
more. New Hampshire with their “live free or die” shown on their license plates doesn’t have a mandatory moto helmet law . After all it’s my head to protect or not as I see fit. And we pay enough taxes for health card to cover accident costs. We are being legislated into the ground. In Montreal we can’t even drive over the mountain. But compulsory voting is extreme and I wouldn’t appreciate being told I have to vote.

Good for you, Brian. Should you want to hop over the border, there
are license plates available for your vehicle, made by our local
prison inmates. Because, in addition to freedom, we love irony.

That, approximately, is the go-to question put forward in defense of women who come under scrutiny after coming forward with questionable allegations of sexual assault or other misconduct, as in the current matter of Brett Kavanaugh. It is the wrong question.

Or, more precisely: It is the wrong question if what we desire to do is
to get as near as we can to the truth of the matter at hand. It is an
excellent question if your desire is something else, especially
misdirection. “Why would she lie?” is a question that obliges us to
engage in mind-reading and redirects us from answerable questions to
unanswerable ones. As a rhetorical ploy, it is transparent: Engaging the
question puts Kavanaugh’s defenders and would-be defenders in a
difficult position, and it puts Kavanaugh’s antagonists in an easier
position, from which they may point and shriek that their opponents are
victimizing an already victimized woman without any dispositive evidence
to support their claim. It’s silly and sophomoric — which,
unfortunately, means that it is likely to be effective in our current
political environment, which is dominated by hysteria, dishonesty, and
stupidity.

But we know, from recent history, that people do lie about
such things. Or (sometimes) come to believe that things happened,
that didn't.

I went to a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few years
ago thrown by a pioneering academic and her connected wife. The
assembled group of brilliant young professors and researchers
promised a stimulating evening.

It was anything but. After the opening small talk devolved into the
political, the air was full of complaints about inequality and
poverty, racism, sexism, fascist Republicans, and how, in general,
everything is going to hell. I stifled myself as long as I could,
but finally I piped up—that’s not what’s really going on. Have you
actually looked at the numbers? For the past 25 years, the world has
only been getting better. People are healthier, wealthier, more
educated, and living longer, better lives than humans ever have.

Silence. All eyes on me. Who threw the skunk in the room?

Then the shitstorm began. Of course, you’re wrong, things are not better, just look around—and it’s all just going to get worse yadda yadda. Shut me right up.

I usually don't quote this much, but Louis goes on to note something
important:

[P]olitics—which has now come to infect all aspects of our lives—isn’t a rational response to reality. It’s partially about currying social favor with desired cohorts; but, worse, it’s emotional pathology.

In
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich wrote that
politics can be the outward manifestation of personal emotional
problems. Instead of working on our own issues, some instead work
them out on society at large. (Sound familiar?)

We’re living through a moment when this phenomenon is vivid. The
unease among elites of the first world, the palpable emotional
distress of our friends, the media’s daily two minutes of hate, the
social media flash mobs, the tribalism, the way every aspect of our
lives has become political.

That might seem to be an odd thing to note on a blog that
concentrates on current-event politics. It's easy to apply Louis's
observation to others, difficult to apply to oneself. That probably
means that it's important to see how it applies to oneself.

At City Journal, Henry I. Miller wonders if there's some way
that we could tell if our politicians are
Fit to Serve?

Perhaps we should ask candidates (and incumbents), including the president and vice president, to volunteer for periodic testing of intelligence, mental status, and psychopathology. After all, we often demand to know whether a candidate has recovered from open-heart surgery, cancer, or strokes, and many states require elderly drivers to get relicensed. Testing could answer speculations about mental fitness, one way or the other.

I've noted before that politicians are likely to score more than a
couple sigmas off the norm on a number of personality traits. Some
of that is inevitable, some of that is probably beneficial, but…

Even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, he
will carry scars from the brutal process to get him there.... [A]s
he limps over the finish line... the question could soon shift from
whether he will be confirmed to what kind of justice he will be.

Will Kavanaugh... dig in on the far right, radicalized by the experience? Will he swing the other way towards the middle, determined to improve his reputation among women? Or will he be able to move past it entirely?...

Uh huh. As
Instapundit
summarizes: "After the way we’ve abused him, he can’t possibly be
objective or fair to us."

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain
fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding
truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly
established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their
scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other
departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not
scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been
growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking.
For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside
the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

The complete set of ludicrous papers, with their publication
results, is provided. Including "Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein
Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in".

At best, then, the hoax shows that some poor-quality papers sometimes get published in marginal academic journals, and sometimes (but less frequently) get published in mainstream journals. That’s it. But this isn’t very surprising. After all, while peer-review if often held up as the gold standard of academic gate-keeping we have to keep in mind that low-performing academics have peers too. Just like the “Conceptual Penis” hoax that the same hoaxers made much to-do about last year this hoax thus doesn’t tell us anything at all about the overall quality of the academic subfields targeted.

URLs du Jour

The existence of a monthly journal focused on “feminist
geography” is a sign of something gone awry in academia. The journal
in question—Gender, Place & Culture—published a paper online in
May whose author claimed to have spent a year observing canine
sexual misconduct in Portland, Ore., parks.

The author admits that “my own anthropocentric frame” makes it difficult to judge animal consent. Still, the paper claims dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’ ” and issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.”

Jillian goes on to reveal a widespread project to dupe a number of
"grievance studies" journals into accepting hoax articles.
Unfortunately now the cat is out of the bag, so …

Hm, I just got an idea for a good article: "The Cat/Bag Metaphor:
Gratuitous Animal Cruelty Considered as Intersectional Tensor of
Oppression".

Ah, no, that's not their global warming solution. Instead, it refers
to the British tabloid paper The Sun. Quoting from the linked
article:

The European Commission has come up with a new way to prevent people backing Brexit – not by winning the argument, but by curbing press freedom. They want to stop the British press encouraging ‘hatred’ of EU leaders and judges, and impose a ‘European approach’ of ‘smart regulation’ to control the views expressed by the tabloids and their supposedly non-smart readers.

I could see President Kamala Harris floating a similar proposal to muzzle
Fox News in (say) 2022.

I've said this before: when pols describe their proposals as
"smart" or
"common sense", it's a red flag. If you oppose a "smart" policy,
that—automatically—makes you stupid. If you're against "common
sense" regulation, you are obviously working in bad faith, and probably in the
employ of the evildoers.

The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what
["Media/technology scholar, author and journalist" Morten] Bay calls “real fantagonists,” which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; “Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human,” he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place.

"A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls," Bay writes of the negative tweets.

I liked
The
Last Jedi OK, except it being too grim and too long. And
Princess Mary Poppins Leia.
I guess
that means I'm not a Russian troll, kind of a relief.

Note: I think the paper's "Russian troll" evidence is very
circumstantial and not particularly convincing.

Jonah Goldberg writes what could become an evergreen headline:
You
Idiot Reporters Are Making It Worse. Specifically, said
reporters are
lending credibility to President Trump's "fake news" charges.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of years decrying the increasing partisan tribalism of our politics. I’ve earned some strange new respect from liberals (and at times regrettable new enmity from some conservatives) because I’ve been willing to call out my team. A case in point: I don’t like President Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric about the “fake news.” I don’t think it’s true or helpful or presidential. “Enemy of the people” is a totalitarian and authoritarian term of art unfit for our country or our president, and employing it gives license to the press to indulge its worst instincts.

Which brings us to the current moment. Democratic senators who announced they would never vote for Kavanaugh under any circumstance keep getting asked if the FBI investigation they demanded will be “enough for them.” Enough for what? To still vote no? I’m not criticizing the Democrats themselves — though I obviously could — I’m criticizing the people who interview these senators. Time and again, these journalists interview the Democrats as if they were open-minded about this investigation when in every breath they insist that the investigation will be illegitimate if it doesn’t prove what they want it to prove.

Yep. Credit Jonah with the strong stomach needed to watch said
"journalists"; I've not bothered myself.

We can't entirely dismiss the notion that this is a "recovered
memory." I agree it's unlikely, but we have no way of knowing for
sure, given that we know nothing about the therapy, or the
therapist.

In any event, "recovered memory" is a distraction, because while not impossible the much greater danger is that the therapist used a treatment modality, such as hypnosis, that affected Ford's perception of the memory, or engaged in suggestive questioning that doesn't arise to the level of "recovered memory," but skewed the memory. Details of memories from 30 plus years ago are already problematic from a reliability standpoint,* but memories that have been subject to hypnosis and related techniques are especially unreliable. Hypnosis can enhance memory, but it can also both lead the subject to add details to a memory, and to be much more confident that all the details of his memory are accurate.

Steve Geddes has grown a gourd that will put whatever you pick from your local pumpkin patch this year to shame. As The Boston Globe reports, his pumpkin weighed in at 2528 pounds at the Deerfield Fair in New Hampshire last month, breaking the North American record for largest pumpkin.

The hefty piece of produce emerged as the clear winner of the fair's pumpkin weigh-off [PDF] when Geddes, of Boscawen, New Hampshire, entered it into the competition at the end of September. After securing the first place ribbon and $6000 in prize money, Geddes learned that his bull-sized pumpkin also held the distinction of being the heaviest grown on the continent, besting record-breaking giants cultivated in previous years in Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and California.

The Mental Floss writer did not find a way to work in a "Live
Free or Die" reference into the article.

URLs du Jour

Moral panics, or instances of mass hysteria, have occurred
throughout history. Two of the most notorious are the Salem Witch
Trials of the 1690s and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and '90s. The
panics almost exclusively involve women and children and fears for
their safety, especially from sexual abuse.

We are in the midst of another such panic, but despite the similarities to past episodes, we are still unable to recognize it as such. The current panic has been playing out in the military and on college campuses for nearly a decade, but with the advent of the #MeToo movement, the mass hysteria is creeping into our regular legal system as well. The following are five of the biggest signs that we are experiencing another bout of mass hysteria, this time over sexual assault and harassment.

Click over for the list, but I assume you won't be too surprised by
any of them, if you've been paying attention over the past few
weeks.
But I found number five ("Pseudo-Scientific Theories About Memory
Reign Supreme") especially interesting, given my recent reading
about the foibles of our all-too-human brains.

Two of the major economics stories Americans tell about ourselves don't seem to be true. Yet we are really enamored with the ideas that income inequality is on the move, separating the wealthy from the rest of us ("we" rarely consider ourselves part of the wealthy), and that the middle class is on the verge of extinction (as Pew found recently, fully 47 percent of people in households making over $100,000 a year consider themselves "middle class").

Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Michigan (Flint) has compiled Census data that refute these popular claims. "The Gini index measure of income dispersion reveals that there has been no significant trend of rising income inequality' for US household incomes over the last quarter century," he writes. "The Gini index in 1993 was 0.454 and last year it was 0.482, the same as in 2013, and this statistical measure of income inequality has also shown remarkable stability for the last several decades in a narrow range between 0.46 and 0.48."

We
previously
blogged
about Mark Perry's article; here's another tweet from him blowing up
the "middle class is disappearing" story; it is, sorta, but mostly
because people are getting too rich to be called middle class:

This May Be the Most Important Finding from Today's
Census Bureau Report: Yes, the US Middle Class is Disappearing...
But Into Higher Income Groups. The Share of $100K/Yr US Households
Has Increased 3X Over the Last 50 Yrs, from 9% in 1967 to 29.2% in
2017 @swinshi@WilcoxNMPpic.twitter.com/sFjprYDbKf

To provide medical services as a doctor, one must be licensed, and
to be licensed, one must have completed a four-year undergraduate
degree and a four-year medical degree, plus four to six years of
residency training. There are only 141 accredited medical schools
in the United States, and Congress anchors the number of residency
positions to the level of Medicare funding, resulting in 110,000
residency positions currently filled. Want to unlock more
residency positions? Talk to Congress. Want to start a new medical
school? It would cost an estimated $150 million, due to the
necessity of linking medical education with medical research, and
would take eight years for the Liaison Committee on Medical
Education, under the authority of the U.S. Department of Education,
to accredit your school. That’s a daunting prospect. One small
bright spot is that, despite these challenges, new medical schools
are, in fact, cutting ribbons.

One thing the advocates of "single payer" tend to gloss over
(or
handwave
away)
is that
their proposals dictate sharp cutting of incomes for health care
professionals.

So would relaxation of the onerous licensure restrictions on health
care provision.

I wonder which approach would be more popular with doctors,
nurses, etc.?

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in our nation's history, but most Americans have probably never sat down and read it from beginning to end. This poster from Pop Chart Lab makes the 242-year-old document a lot less daunting.

In the Diagrammed Declaration of Independence, the text is broken down section by section. The most important phrases, like "all men are created equal," "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and "let facts be submitted to a candid world," are highlighted in big, bold lettering. Arrows show how the different ideas in the document connect, and colorful pictographs illustrate various points, like the three branches of government.

URLs du Jour

2018-10-01

As Jonah Goldberg reports in the recent G-File, when it comes to the
Kavanaugh nomination, we're in
The
Moral-Panic Phase.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been getting so much grief from left and right for the alleged sin of “both sides-ism” over the last few years, but Thursday (yesterday for me) was both clarifying and cathartic. Oh, don’t get me wrong: It was horrible and possibly tragic for the Court and the country, but it was also oddly — and probably momentarily — liberating, at least for me.

Because, finally, there was a left–right fight about which I am largely un-conflicted. This wasn’t a brouhaha about Trump or any of the usual stuff. The issue here was that the Democrats and their abettors in the media simply behaved atrociously.

I'm in agreement. Jonah has many, many examples of the atrocious
behavior, so if your blood pressure can stand it, click on over.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh mentioned beer 28 times during his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, inviting mockery and semiotic speculation. The reason the subject came up was pretty clear: Christine Blasey Ford, the California research psychologist who says he tried to rape her when they were both in high school, described him as very drunk at the time, and one possible explanation for his seeming sincerity in denying her charge (in addition to the possibility that he is innocent) is that he honestly does not recall the episode because alcohol clouded his memory.

In response to repetitive questioning on the subject, Kavanaugh said no fewer than 10 times that he has never experienced alcohol-related memory gaps. But the discussion of Kavanaugh's drinking during high school and college ranged beyond that narrow issue, and his responses were by turns defiant, evasive, implausible, and misleading. The tenor of those exchanges was partly due to Kavanaugh's resentment of questions he deemed nosy and irrelevant. But it also reflected the clash between official expectations and the reality of adolescent drinking in America, a contradiction that he and his interlocutors seemed keen to ignore.

I'm old enough to remember when people pointed out that if you were
old enough to get drafted and shot at in Vietnam, just maybe you
were old enough to be considered a legal adult for all other
purposes: voting, buying sinful substances, etc.

That was a simple rule. But along the line we got pushed into the
idea that 18-21 was a phantom zone of "adult but not really"—we'll
trust 'em to do this (e.g., vote) but not that (e.g.,
have a beer). An incoherent policy based on whim.

The latte is the most popular coffee drink in the United States among indie shop consumers, with more than 67 million of them ordered at Square registers over the year, with an average price of $4.16. The cheapest average latte price was found in Idaho ($3.49), which is perhaps not coincidentally the nation’s third largest milk producer. The most expensive latte? You guessed it… North Dakota. An average latte in the Roughrider State will cost you $4.45.

In 44 U.S. states, the latte is the most common drink. The outliers by drink type are: mocha (Alaska); tea (Hawaii and New Mexico); and a trio of old-school Northeastern states that appreciate the clarity, consistency and speed of a good old fashioned filter drip coffee (Maine, Connecticut and New Hampshire).

Also, Americans are increasingly customizing their lattes, exceeding two
add-ons per order on average. The most complicated drink orders are
coming from tea-loving Hawaii, fancy-pants North Dakota and New
Hampshire (Live Free or Die!).

It's full of interesting factoids about what people are ordering.
But I especially liked their implication that LFOD means "Live Free
By Ordering A Complex Mix Of Ingredients In Your Latte Or Die".
That's a new one.

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